


Tiger Squadron: The Esharioc Incursion

by BaelPenrose



Series: Tiger Squadron [6]
Category: Military Science Fiction - Fandom, Original Work, Science Fiction - Fandom, humans are space orcs - Fandom
Genre: Action, Aliens, Earth is Space Australia, Earth is a Death World, F/M, Genocide, HFY, Humans Are Weird, Hurt/Comfort, I should probably warn about, No Smut, Original Science Fiction, Platonic Hurt/Comfort, Space Otters - Freeform, There is genocide in this arc, and it worked suprisingly well, badass fighter pilots, come on who in their right mind doesn't like otters, humans baffle aliens, oh yeah, so now we're doing it here, this series ends with the same lack of smut it had to begin with, tried my hand at humans are space orcs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:21:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 31
Words: 57,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23555980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BaelPenrose/pseuds/BaelPenrose
Summary: The final arc. Jake and Callie have been enjoying a (finally) successful retirement, and the galaxy licks its wounds from the upheaveals. A new coalition government has formed - the Hegemony of Free Worlds. After a combined action against the Sclunter Marauders that left the people shaken, the galaxy has settled into a quiet peace.But there's one more struggle on the horizon. One more terrible and greater in scale than all before it.
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Female Character
Series: Tiger Squadron [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1695037
Kudos: 27





	1. Life on Haven

_ Seven years after the fall of Rietarch, the now-retired founders of Tiger Squadron are moving, along with their two children, to Haven. The hub world of cultural exchange had some of the best schools anywhere in the galaxy, and their children were now coming to the age where that became seriously important. The galaxy as a whole is finally beginning to recover from the horrific outbreaks of Kyriion, and as side effect of Galri medicine, a fertility spike has led to a population boom by every species in the Hegemony. _

Tony and Alicia were running all over the place again. Alicia was a little older, the one conceived on the Khan, born on Tildas II. Tony had been born on Haven. Seven and five. Seven years ago, they’d landed back on Tildas II, and started to farm there, for once actually starting to appreciate the calm.

Captain Amelia was still sending them reports, still held out hopes that they’d come back into action. The press wasn’t much better, but these days…

Nathian views were forefront in their minds. Their obligation was to their family, and while they continued to practice in sims, just in case, they were only getting back in the cockpit of a Rakshasa if it was required to defend home. They were in their early forties now, and while the miracles of genetic medicine coupling with exercise meant that their reflexes and physical prowess remained undimmed, they’d spent more of their lives while in the Navy, in space than they had planet-side, and the Andalas were perfectly happy to stay on a surface for now.

Jake was still walking around the courtyard of the university, as he and Callie were both thinking about returning to at least part-time schooling, looking for more lucrative civilian jobs on this planet. He sidestepped a group of praying Galri and walked past a building from whence both the high-pitched Palnt accents and the deeper cadences of the Dembra were audible, arguing about the fine points of hyperdense metal smelting. He bumped into a young human woman, startlingly pale, and quickly got out an apology.

“Sorry, miss. Just looking around. My wife and I are thinking about going back to school for a while.”

The woman shook her head. “No worries. Name’s Jessie Jaegar, I’m an engineering student, you?”

Jake smiled. “Jake Andala. Any relation to Maj. General Hann Jaegar?”

Jessie grinned. “His daughter, actually. Jake Andala…like the ace pilot?”

Jake nodded. “Well, retired, but yeah. Former Second in command, Tiger Squadron.” Jessie squee’d, and started talking rapidly. “Oh, wow, Dad told me so much about you, said you and your wife were incredible. I can’t wait to tell him I met you.”

Jake chuckled, weakly, “Yeah. That’s great.” His good mood was gone. Jaegar had been amongst the most supportive of the military personnel he’d spoken to after he had retired from active duty, but it was clear that the German commander didn’t understand why he and Callie had mustered out, and every time either of them spoke to the soldier, the question lay heavy on the air.

Walking back towards the bench where Callie was sitting, watching Alicia and Tony play, he sat down next to his wife with a smile, as she muttered, “Amelia sent us another message, asking if we want to see the Khan again. Forget that she’s a better leader of that unit than we were.”

Jake sighed, “Guess people just put too much faith in heroes. Speaking of heroes, just bumped into Jaegar’s daughter.”

Callie blinked. “Really? What’s she doing?”

“Studying engineering, apparently. So, we live on the Hegemonic capitol now, think we can get Namna and Shen to visit us at some point?”

“Let’s hope so, the kids have been wanting to see Auntie Namna for a while now.” Alicia was starting school tomorrow, and she was finally in the year where they started talking about history.

“Are we ready to explain to her about well… why we know the military types so well, why the friends we named them after died, about our part in…all the history she’s going to learn this year?”

Jake slouched in the bench. “I don’t know. She and Tony are pretty bright. It isn’t…it’s not that her knowing about what we were bothers me. It’s that she’s going to ask what made us stop, and she’ll blame herself if we say we resigned to raise her. And to keep her from doing that, we’ll have to explain…well, we’ll have to explain the other reasons. We’ll have to explain why mom and dad have nightmares, why we occasionally go from staring happily at the stars to shaking…”

Callie shuddered. “We’ll manage. We’ll probably tell them a little at a time.”

Alicia ran back to them. “Mom, Dad, meet Temin.” The Nathian she’d dragged along by the paw smiled and introduced himself. “Hello, sir, ma’am.” Alicia started talking again, excited, “He’s going to be in my class this year, and there’s this Galri girl I hope will talk to me.”

The parents swapped a look, and nodded. “I’m sure she will.” If only because you aren’t likely to give her a choice. Their daughter was inquisitive and was remarked on by previous teachers as being proof positive that humans came out of the womb looking for things to bond with, having made friends with just about everything in that class, regardless of species. She’d been excited to introduce a young Vulpexi and Tyrsian, though her objections to Tenebrae seemed mostly to relate to them cheating once she’d taught them the point of hide-and-seek.

Tony was a little quieter, shier. He spent more time with Dembra or Epomi, though occasionally he’d try playing with a Keldebriar cub. He was only in kindergarten though, super empathetic, liked being with the quieter ones.

***

Namna was running a supply mission to an Ambrin colony who had suffered a series of bad harvests. Unfortunately she was now obligated to do so from a desk, organizing the whole thing, instead of being on the ground to help directly but that was the price of promotion. Organizing transport columns, relief efforts, and hardly ever getting to go out on them herself. That sector apparently was still having issues with pirates, so she gave a notice to the military heads of the Hegemony that she was going to request escort ships and possibly an infantry unit to go clean out any raider base discovered.

Still, the people of the Asteris system were in need of food and power packs, and several million tons could arrive within the week.

***

Amelia was getting frustrated. Captain of Tiger Squadron, ever since the previous command team had resigned their commissions and finally given peace a shot, mistress and commander of the Khan and the fighters docked within it. Nothing to fight but damn pirates or police actions, and every once in a while some system in the Hegemony would start causing problems.

Still, it wasn’t too bad. She was the commander of a unit that she’d worshipped since she was a kid. Paperwork she could handle. Simulated fire, live-drive dogfights against Keldebriar aces she could handle, though she wished Tiger Squadron could stay ahead on the win-loss ratio for more than a few days running.

As she walked by the Wall, she paused and traced the names of all the Tiger pilots who’d been KIA. Even the ones who had been lost before the Squadron got the carrier. It could always be worse. They could be having another war.

And the prisoner they’d taken when they’d fought the Keldebriar last time was a friend of hers, frequently sharing notes about better maneuvers their two squadrons could preform in combined operations.

***

Jaegar and his ex-wife were getting letters from Jessie. The science fair project her team had done had gotten them attention, which had gotten them mentorship, which had gotten them scholarships to a school of engineering on fucking Haven, the new capitol world of the Hegemony, the multi-species nation state that the Terran Republic and all others had joined in the aftermath of the revolt at Rietarch. She was studying well, impressing both Palnt craftsmen and Dembra smiths, and her professors were unilaterally impressed. Still, she made an effort to learn from Galri biotech, especially since it had made such a huge difference in her life.

The last battles of the Carsai campaign where the Sclunter had been finally destroyed had been rough, and the fighting in those tunnels had certainly taken a toll on him. Then again, he figured, the mere fact that it was openly acknowledged as an extermination war had been enough to turn his stomach. Even with the excuses the politicians had given, it hadn’t been right, even if it had been necessary.

Peace hopes had been abandoned once a critical aspect of Sclunter biology had been discovered, along with evidence that a bit of genetic engineering, well preceding their domination by the Vulpexi, had been discovered. The Sclunter needed the rush of endorphins they got during combat or they started developing autoimmune problems, and every offer to help them by the Galri had resulted in those brave life-forges being brutally murdered, and thus even the gentlest of leaders had signed off on the order: for the sake of peace in the galaxy, the Sclunter were to be purged. The Keldebriar had gone with it, despite their codes against destroying innocent life: under their laws, anything that was biologically compelled to make war left one no choice.

Still. Jaegar had been sickened by the acts he’d had to commit, often still woke up shaking from nightmares, as did many of the soldiers who’d taken part in the work. It had been necessary, but it had been horrific, made more so by the fact that while the Sclunter were a threat to civilians, trained soldiers destroyed them easily. Still the question haunted him: What the hell had changed them to be like that?

***

Kaisa was excited as xe created the nanites. The specially bred bacteria re-aligned peoples’ genomes, destroying cancer and hard-coding genetic systems against developing further ones. Oh, cancers could be cured by just about every species, even those who’s medical developments had been stifled by greed for centuries, such as the Vulpexi or humans, but those treatments were hard on the body. There was only so much even the most advanced chemical treatments could do to mitigate harsh side effects, after all. Much better to simply alter the patient to make their body able to stop the problem before it started.

Xe checked xer patients, the Palnt dealing with the growths in his lungs from an accidental exposure to dangerous gasses on a planet his people were surveying, the young human boy whose spine had been snapped in a tragic accident…made less tragic now by the fact that his spine could be regrown with nervous samples from it and time for the nanites to work. On and on the list went, the burn patients whose skin and nerves and tissues could be so easily regrown…

***

Endirmas was still working on his history of humanity’s time in the stars, and getting messages from his philum head, who told him that his friend Adisa would absolutely be getting a pay raise. They were most pleased with her handling of the philum heads who refused to acknowledge that the Vulpexi were no longer ruled by greed.

Endirmas’s eyestalks wiggled in delight as he continued working on his master’s thesis, the Titans of Terra.

***

Jake, Callie and their children relaxed at home. Namna had been able to come by after all, and Tony and Alicia both jumped on her, hugging her fiercely. Namna hugged her brother and sister, excited as ever to see her niece and nephew.

“So, you two, excited for the kids to start school?” Callie laughed a bit. “Yeah, little bit.” The kids were running around, having noticed with excitement that Namna had brought two of her adopted pups with her, one Nathian and one Palnt.

“Excited for them to find out about…”

Jake thought about it. “Excited? Not really. But going to be glad to have a direction to take that discussion? You bet.”

That was, after all, how humans handled the big questions. Take them as they were asked.


	2. Confusing Discovery

The Ivari aboard the research vessel searching the Dead Zones were electrified by the evidence they were seeing. Their dead home world, emptied over a thousand standard years ago by the first Kyriion outbreak. One of the few things held up by those who argued over faith in favor of the notion that either there was no higher power, or that any extant higher power was an omnicidal maniac. Because if evolution had any guiding force, that meant something had intended Kyriion, and nothing sane would ever have done so.

Theological jokes in exceedingly bad taste not withstanding, to see the world that their race had abandoned, before they were Ivari, back when they were Ymril, it was enough to bring tears to the eyes of the captain. The first to see their original homeworld in millennia.

Possibly. After the first outbreak, twelve ships, believed fully clean, had departed the dying world, attempting to flee. Three of those were proven contaminated, which was how the plague had initially spread. Of the remaining nine, one had gone completely silent, and it still wasn’t known what had happened to it. The remaining eight carried those Ymril that had become the Ivari, or survivors, of the original race, and rebuilt themselves, slowly adapting to survive aboard ships for the bulk of their lives.

Now, though, they were seeking information about where the Lost Ship had gone. There was evidence of certain particles that seemed to indicate a strange burst of energy in the last known co-ordinates of the Lost Ship, but nothing more. Not the kind of indicators that would suggest destruction, either, just an event that had left some really strange radioactive byproducts and a dark matter distortion.

“System reads clear of further byproducts of a ship passing through here or jumping to hyperspace in that timeframe, though. It looks like they just…vanished.” That didn’t feel likely to the captain, but the evidence spoke that the Lost Ship had been lost in this system, somehow, and hadn’t gone to any others.

“Check for any readings consistent with the engines being blown out after falling into a star.”

The tech did the scans, and replied, “No sir. If it did, it didn’t leave any signatures of having done so.” The captain cursed. This investigation had been hard to get permission for, hard to convince the higher-ups, but it was important. The other Plague ships had been accounted for. It was important to make sure that the Lost Ship was.

“Where could this fucking thing have gone?”

“Might have fallen into the star, I mean, a thousand years ago any energy signatures of that kind of meltdown would be pretty well decayed by now. Which I can’t say for the residual particles that would be here if it had made a warp jump out.”

The captain paused, then sighed, wearily. “I hope that’s all it is, but hyperspace breaching doesn’t leave dark matter signatures like this. Do we have any idea where those came from?”

The science officer shook his head. “Those readings are unusual, but I suspect it’s an unrelated anomaly, or perhaps the anomaly that caused those is what caused the Lost Ship’s instruments to fail and crash into the star?”

The captain didn’t like it. He’d been spending too much time with humans, maybe, but his instincts said something else had gone on here, something strange, something of consequence. Still, he’d be ignored if he spoke on that, or castigated for investigating wild hunches. “Alright, ready the jump back to a living sector. We found what we’re going to find.”

****

Alicia was laughing as a young Keldebriar boy pounced on her in their game. “No fair! You have better reflexes!” The Keldebriar shrugged. “You’re it, Alicia,” he dodged her clumsy swipe and began sprinting away from her, but tired fast enough that she overtook him. “No fair!” he mocked. “You have better endurance.”

She shoved him playfully. “Catch me if you can!” He swiped out and tagged her again.

***

The Hegemon shuffled her papers, looking at the ongoing reports from the assorted worlds of the hegemony. In the twelve years since its formation, the group now claimed over three hundred worlds, now teeming with life. With the exception of the forced hand annihilation of the Sclunter, there had been no conflict, despite the military remaining ready, the general theory being, “We didn’t see the Synthor coming, and there’s lots of worlds we haven’t fully explored, we’d rather be ready in case we find another hive like the Kilicks or another sleeping robotic nightmare.”

The Nathian currently functioning as head of state for just under half a trillion beings, with more species reaching the stars and joining the Hegemony each week, bringing their own technology, culture, and ideas to the community, bringing some of their artworks and culture to Haven, and building their own networks of trade, exchange, and communication.

But why did she feel so nervous?

***

The ships dropped out of hyperspace, having been plunging through the endless spiraling higher dimension they’d been soaring through for twenty of their years. They had come to save their own people, and to do that required sacrifice.

This galaxy must be emptied of life to prevent the horror inflicted upon their own.


	3. First Contact

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First battle with the new threat

The Knight Commander twitched in anticipation, sloping head’s strange features twitching. The People had drawn first blood. The crusade of survival had begun properly, the sterilization of this people’s world had begun, cleansing the planet.

The local life forms were less advanced. First generation FTL, low-grade kinetic weaponry, fission missiles…unimpressive. They were not the harbingers who had brought Home to ruin, nor even progenitors thereof.

But they were still potential vectors for the Abomination, and thus, they would be purged.

***

Patrol sector 1662 of the Rim. Distress signals from the Gehnkl, a species that had joined the Hegemony only a few weeks ago. Reported strange ships and unknown signals closing around the system and local defense groups defeated handily.

A standard Hegemonic task force had been sent to investigate, mix of Keldebriar and human ships with a handful of Ivari reconnaissance ships, as well as a full planet-side command, three divisions of the Hegemonic Guard, another mixed species unit that had replaced many of the previous individual armies, though each group maintained their own specialized units. At least one of the Ivari recon pilots, Ywyn, had prior experience with stealth piloting from her times as a smuggler, bringing supplies and aid to those who’d needed it during the Marauder War. She was looking to prove herself enough to pass selection to Tiger Squadron, and in truth it was at least possible. They’d opened themselves to any species insane enough to

Dropping out of hyperspace, the task force got a clear view of the destruction wreaked upon the Gehnkl ships, though the metal looked as though it had been flash boiled by something. There were laser weapons that could do that, but they were widely considered inefficient when plasma or kinetic weapons could deliver similarly deadly results with less power output.

There was the burned-out hulk of a single ship, large and studded with weapons, but torn open by the blast of a nuclear missile. The gutted hulks of dozens of Gehnkl ships surrounded the planet, and the Ivari recon ships were dispatched to the surface to get a glimpse of what was going on.

The scans of the system indicated that the attack had come suddenly and cruelly, tearing through automated defenses with minimal harm to the attacker. The ships were definitely not made by Tyrsian, Human or Keldebriar, and bore none of the heaviness of Dembra creation or Palnt precision. They were alien, and while it was wholly possible that there was a nation they’d had no contact with that could do this, the Ivari had finally opened up about the goings on of the galaxy that they knew about, and had mentioned no such thing.

“Ywyn,” the task force commander called. “Are you sure that the Ivari know nothing of any other starfaring empire?”

“Certain. The higher-ups tell every ship pilot, even renegades, about anything that could be a threat. Don’t want any of us giving up the location of the few of our people who remain.” The scorn in her voice was clear. “There’s nothing else we know about. Not,” the Ivari added wryly, “that there couldn’t have been things that might have made it to FTL since the Kyriion Plague a thousand standard years ago. It might well be one of them.”

The commander winced. “Yeah, could be. Any luck on the scans?”

“Not yet. Negative lifesigns just about everywhere. Weird though, Geiger scans light the place up like a neon sign. The attackers glassed this place, but it looks like it wasn’t from orbital guns. Not seeing a lot of bodies, but I am seeing a lot of remains.”

“Care to be a bit more detailed?”

That was the commander. Lieutenant Silvanus Hanes was rolling his eyes. The commander of this task force had a bad habit of getting focused entirely too hard on one aspect and not paying attention to the rest. Purely on a hunch, he growled an order to the enlisted personnel at the sensor suite, “Engage full scans, Geiger sweep, electrostatic pulse sweep, x-ray, thermal, everything.”

Ywyn’s voice came back. “Yeah, there’s some bodies here that aren’t Gehnkl, some weird…look sorta arthropod, maybe amphibian. They’re definitely nothing in the archives, though.” She took a breath. “Whatever happened here, I think we missed it. I think we should gather up these bodies, take a look at them to see what’s happening. Oh, and were I you, I’d consider, why would an attack like this leave the beacon on?”

The commander spoke, “I appreciate the advice, but you’re a scout, not a soldier. I’ll handle the command decisions…”

Hanes shook his head. “Commander, she’s right. This is a trap. They wouldn’t have left the beacon on unless they wanted us to investigate. Now, they may well not be here in force anymore, but that doesn’t mean…”

The sensor scan he’d ordered screamed as one of the frigates suddenly and spontaneously exploded. The commander ordered the fleet into reactive formation, and Silvanus cursed. The standard reactive formation would allow for ships to support fire for each other but with the current situation it was also going to string them out and make it harder to make a rapid retreat.

The weapons suite system finally had tracking on the targets they were picking up on the sensors and began unleashing a barrage of heavy gauss gun fire and plasma cannons. The return fire was immediate and devastating, a handful of high-powered blasts skating harmlessly off the task force’s shields, but quickly piercing through and starting to carve large sections out of the hull of a battleship, which fired back frantically at the sleek, angular black and chrome ships that had appeared on their sensors, all the while attempting to maneuver.

The commander was rapidly giving orders, but it was clear that this man’s battles had only been against the Vulpexi, years ago, or during the extermination of the Sclunter, as neither the Dominion or the pirates had ever had much in the way of tactical acumen by comparison to the Keldebriar, and these fuckers were on par with the cats.

Hanes cursed to himself, quietly. “Sheeting fire, grid pattern, maneuver and interlock, jump out by section.”

The commander started barking at him and he snarled, “Commander they’ve got us badly outnumbered and outgunned, we need to make an exit or we’re going to be slaughtered. Order the firing solution, now.”

The firing patterns didn’t actually destroy many of the enemy craft, but it forced them to break off the assault and begin engaging in evasive maneuvers of their own. Ywyn reported that the recon ships were jumping out of the system, and the Hegemonic task force made it out, under a brutal hail of fire.

Well, half of them did. Only a handful of confirmed enemy kills. Whatever had just happened, it was bad. Hanes requested a transfer to Lion Fleet, and Ywyn had put in what she stated was her nineteenth request to transfer to Tiger Squadron.

***

When Amelia got the request, she contacted Ywyn. “You say this is your nineteenth request, spacer Ywyn, but we have no record of any such request.”

“The previous officers here might not have kept records.” It bothered Amelia more than she could say that she had to consider the possibility of her former idols being that negligent, but she realized they wouldn’t have been. They were always meticulous about keeping track of anyone interested in transferring, since they needed all the pilots they could get, and after growing up with the Nathians they weren’t exactly the type to insist on “human only” since they often debated whether or not they fully qualified.

“No, doubt it. You may have sent those requests, but we never got them. We’re getting a new cadre of pilots, more than just you, in a few standard days. Show me you’ve got the piloting chops on that, you’re in.”

***

Hendrix looked at the transfer request. She always needed more good bridge officers, and Hanes seemed as good as any, and his quick thinking had been the reason that the task force had gotten out alive after the humiliating first contact with this new threat.

And his qualifications were superb. High marks, prestigious academy, action as part of Third Armada during the conflicts with both the Vulpexi and the Synthor, with some admittedly limited involvement in the Marauder War in the Carsai system. Her previous bridge officer had retired, the work during the extermination had proven too much for him.

“Alright, send the transfer forms. I’ll sign them.” Hendrix sighed. She knew what was coming next. The Hegemony didn’t want to engage in another all-out war. The Sclunter had been necessary. They’d learned that, to their shock and disgust. The poor bastards had bred strangely. Because of their unique physiology, they wound up developing auto-immune disorders if they didn’t regularly release the stress hormones associated with fight-or-flight. And while the Galri had repeatedly entreated the Sclunter, begged them that it wasn’t their fault, that the Galri could help them, could rid them of the need.

Unfortunately the pirates had sent the Galri who’d made that offer back in pieces. And thus had left the Hegemony no choice but a bloody war to deal with the threat, permanently. Not the kind of thing people could be proud of, but necessary.

The public, all the same, understood this, but were horrified by the brutality that such a campaign had necessitated. Another war would be unpopular. Which meant that the first probe, at least until the assault on the innocent world of the Gehnkl was declassified, was going to be Lion Fleet, Tiger Squadron, and the Star Apex in space, and on the ground, Wolf Division, the Tyrsian Furies, Viper Team, and the Hunters. Special units were always the first in before a conflict escalated.

“Lion Fleet will finish preparations, and we will engage the new threat, so that no more species are massacred as the Gehnkl were. No further harm will come to the citizens of the Hegemony, nor other sapient races of the galaxy.” Shiloh Hendrix had not gained a reputation as an invincible commander for nothing. The attackers would never know what hit them.


	4. Before the Storm

The Ivari delivered their report on the Lost ship, unaware of the horror that had happened to the Gehnkl. “There is no doubt that it was lost in that system, but where to, or how, I cannot say. In any case, in the light of the ongoing fruitlessness of such investigations, I believe it best if we stop seeking the lost ship.”

“Agreed. Especially in light of the invasion we’re facing. Details are still classified but there was an attack on a civilian world, and the task force sent to engage it took heavy losses in engaging the attackers before having to retreat.” The Ivari science officer winced. “A Hegemonic Star Guard task force was forced to retreat? What do we know about the attackers?”

“Pretty much fuck all, other than that they have previously unseen weapon systems, shielding systems , armor, point defense, and ground combat weaponry, and that they have some sort of concealment system that makes it hard for them to spot with a majority of standard scanners. Lion Fleet, Tiger Squadron, Star Apex, and the Imperial Shield Fleet are being sent to engage the enemy and see what’s going on.”

The four units mentioned were elite forces of both Keldebriar and humans, and they would likely be able to either turn aside whatever the assault was or buy time for the Hegemonic Guard, both Star and Planetary, to mobilize.

***

Viper Team was reassembled. Adisa wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that. On one hand, she was actually pretty happy in the private sector, working with the Blorgi to ensure the Vulpexi’s Free Economic Zones kept to fair labor standards and ethical practices. On the other hand, the information she was getting from her old contacts, about some serious shit that had gone down in the Rim…

The Hegemony’s Special Operations Command had assembled the relevant groups, the Viper teams that had once been humanity’s assorted special forces, the Keldebriar’s Hunters, and the Tenebrae Shadows. “We have gathered you here today to inform you of troubling events that have occurred on one of the worlds near the galaxy’s outer reaches, the homeworld of the newest species to join the United Hegemony of Free Worlds. Approximately two standard weeks ago, they sent out a signal that they’d come under attack from an unknown military force, sporting weapons with previously unknown effects. We sent a standard task force to engage the threat, presuming it consisted of renegades with modified ships and black market weaponry, but the enemy forces were more of a threat than the brass expected and the task force was repelled. We are sending a larger and more serious force of elite naval units to engage the enemy naval forces, but we are also sending a ground unit, skilled in deep reconnaissance. For the record, this is going to be a recon, not a raid, your purpose is intelligence gathering, not attack. Your goal and mission will be to determine the nature of the enemy ground forces, their tactical doctrines, and the nature of their weaponry where possible so that we can draft a proper doctrine of the Hegemonic Guard when they begin engaging.”

There was a long pause, and then the SOC asked, “Questions?”

Adisa raised a solemn hand. “Am I to understand that the Gehnkl have been evacuated from that world then?”

The SOC shook his head, sadly. “Negative. As best as scans can tell us, they’ve been completely or near-completely wiped out. Which brings us to secondary objectives: if there are any that it is possible to rescue, extract them. You’ll be inserted by means of smuggler stealth ships from the Free Economic Zones, who retain them as mercenaries for exactly situations like this. In six galactic standard months the stealth ships will return for extraction. Do not get bogged down or decisively engaged in that time, and attempt, as best you are able, to remain undetected. I will not tell you what kinds of weaponry to bring, you’re all capable adults, but I will advise that whatever they are, they are likely to have armor enough to stop a flachette weapon.”

Adisa chuckled. Flachette pistols would be useless here, one of those heavier sidearms, the Lancers, would probably be better. She was thinking about her ripper submachinegun, loaded with armor-piercing, exploding rounds, though she also considered the energy-weapon version. No harm in taking both. She didn’t like the RLPC-3, didn’t handle as well as she liked and depleted its energy cells far too fast for comfort, but it was quiet, and the was minimal. Unlike plasma weaponry, it was also completely silent. Plus it had siderails that mounted solar panels to recharge it, which was valuable. Take both, both is good, she concluded.

***

Callie was struggling to answer the question her daughter was asking. She looked to her husband, to see if he had any ideas. They’d been prepared for “What was being in Tiger Squadron like? Why didn’t you tell us you were famous? Why did you leave?”

“We read about the crash of the Horizons, is that why the only grandparents we met aren’t the same species as us?” That was one they weren’t prepared for. Callie tried to remember her biological parents’ faces, hell, from the look on his face, Jake was trying to do the same. But…

It had been so long. They hadn’t really…

“Yeah.” Jake started chuckling, tears in his eyes, then Callie joined in as she realized the irony of the question, “yeah, it is.” Tears were flowing freely, they were laughing like mad, crying at the same time, and suddenly lunged forward to grab Tony and Alicia…

Children named for friends they’d lost too. Then they realized the real reason they’d quit. They held tighter, altogether, thinking about the real reason. It wasn’t that they were afraid of their inability to lead, wasn’t that they wanted to settle down.

It was fear. They’d finally seen, in their daughter’s birth, that they didn’t want to die and leave her alone. Like their parents had. Like the original Alicia had left them. Like the original Tony had, like their original squadron had like everything, other than Namna, eventually had. And as long as they were with their kids, the kids couldn’t die either, and they couldn’t die and leave those kids alone.

As they huddled together, Tony and Alicia confused but happy to be held, disturbed by their parents’ mad laughter, it felt peaceful. Not like real peace, not like the teeth-clenched, “what are we doing” peace they’d had during their temporary retirement, not the strange feeling of genuine peace and acceptance they’d had during their time on Haven to date, but a real, bone deep, joy and ecstatic sense of home.

But then, what was that instinct? The one that whispered to Callie, and Jake as well, by his body language, that this was temporary. The calm before one more storm. And a hunch that it’d be the worst one yet.


	5. Recon

Adisa was deposited on Gehnkl with no fanfare, her mixed ops team consisting of her sniper, Doakes, a demolitions expert, Owens, a Tenebrac named Shaed, a Keldebriar named Prian u’Vis, and a human weapons specialist named Singh. The little team had talked a fair bit on the ship, piloted by Ritia, on the way over, gone from a collection of superb individual warriors to a well-coordinated team. Unknown enemy forces, unknown enemy doctrine, weaponry, the only thing known was the terrain of Gehnkl, and that was goddamn jungle.

The trees on the small planet were massive, even larger than the sequoias of earth. The slightly lower gravity allowed such structures, and the brackish water the small team slipped through muffled sound as long as you moved slowly.

Two days into the jungle, waiting for the full force of the main fleet to engage the enemy forces already in orbit, the small recon team still hadn’t seen any opposition. Doakes had his rifle slung across his back and had a set of climbing gear hooked to his armor, which would allow him to move up a tree, silently, to get a better vantage at a moment’s notice. Owens had a small, carbine-sized plasma rifle as well as a dozen antimatter charges and half as many microfusion grenades.

Shaed was carrying a few knives, monomolecular edged, and a suppressed ripper submachinegun. Prian had a plasma carbine as well, and a shortened pair of vibroblades, allowing for ease of wielding in the close-quarters of jungle. Adisa’s loadout was identical to Prian’s, but with a submachinegun instead of a plasma weapon.

Noise rattled through the trees, prompting Shaed to vanish into the brush, literally with the camouflage of his species and the specialized gear made for it. Doakes snaked up a tree, Owens, Adisa, and Prian getting into position to see whatever it was at a safe distance.

Ten power-armored beings, long, gangly limbs, broad, double-jointed shoulders with arms that ended in four-digit talons. The armor was black as the void of space, though one was flanged in crimson trim. Each bore a strange silver weapon in their hands, and across each one’s back was a long-hilted vibroblade. Roughly two and a half meters tall, with sloped heads and strangely snake-like spines that allowed them to swivel strangely, the enemy fanned the area professionally, and it was only the experience of the special operatives that allowed them to remain unseen. Not that Adisa disliked her team’s odds against the small patrol from the ambush, but she didn’t know what those weapons would do, and if these were like normal patrols, there would be others sent out, far more alert, if these didn’t make it back.

A flash of movement as one of the arboreal amphibians native to this world plunged towards the enemy, hacking furiously with a vibroblade, downing one before being engaged by another with their own blades, but realizing it was outclassed, the Gehnk turned and fled. The enemy soldier with the crimson-flanged armor unlimbered the chrome-blue ranged weapon, raised it, and fired, causing the guerrilla to suddenly catch fire and blow apart.

Adisa managed not to scream. Death wasn’t shocking, even gruesome death. But that…She’d never seen a weapon that could do that. And she wasn’t certain how it did it, which meant she had no idea if any armor system the Hegemony had could defend against it. The one in the red-trimmed armor began speaking in a language Adisa had never heard, “Varis, Esharioc lagis! Crinoch vacnt.” The enemy hoisted the body of their fallen ally and carried it back, leaving the flaming glop that had been their attacker in the muck.

That was not Galick. That wasn’t any pre-dominion tongue, that wasn’t anything she’d ever heard. Didn’t sound similar to anything, though the rough tones did seem to indicate multiple jaws, if Dembra voices were any indicator. After the enemy patrol moved on, she looked to Shaed. “You got that recorded, right?” Shaed signaled the affirmative. “Good. We’re going to want all of that analyzed, the weapons, the armor, the language.”

Shaed nodded. “Of course. I will remain your unseen eyes.” Adisa nodded, and signaled for Doakes to come down from his leafy perch. He slithered down the trunk as Prian and Owen emerged as well. “Alright. Those weapons, anyone have any idea what the hell that is?”

“Let’s rule out possibilities first. We didn’t hear a sonic boom, so presumably it isn’t a hypervelocity projectile weapon. We didn’t see muzzle flash, which is more in line with a pulse gun, but that Gehnk didn’t disintegrate, he exploded. That’s not a gamma-radiation based weapon.”

That seemed likely, but what could do something like that? “Alright. So energy weapon of some kind. And their armor?”

“Looked thicker based on how long it took blood to come out, so it might be hard for submachineguns to get through. It’ll probably turn aside anything but direct hits with the plasma weapons too.”

Adisa swore at that, and then nodded. “Alright. Learning stuff already. Unfortunately none of it is even remotely good. Let’s get closer and see what’s happening.”

The jungle was still hot and misty. The enemy forces had regular patrols, something that Adisa was unfamiliar with. Neither Sclunter or the Dominion had ever bothered with patrols, and with few exceptions the mercenaries that her targets in the FEZ had been fairly sloppy as well.

Which indicated if nothing else that unlike the Dominion, who used numerical advantage and superior weaponry with minimal training, or the Sclunter, who mostly fought civilians, that whatever these things were, they had a professional, well-trained military force. Who also had slightly more advanced weapons than anything she’d seen.

This was not looking great for the home team.

Their heads were sloped, she realized, oblong and angular. Either they had vicious spikes protruding from what appeared to be a joint analogous to the elbow, or they simply added that to armor. Adisa flashed a quick series of hand gestures to her team. We’ll tail them back to their base and see what setup they have there.

The trip was slow-going, they had to let their methodical quarry, which would often stop suddenly to investigate other sounds, stay far enough ahead of them not to take notice of their presence, but remain close enough that there was no risk of the enemy getting away. They limited their communication to hand gestures and sub-vocal communications nets, to avoid being heard or seen. That would have been fine, military hand gestures allowed one to communicate all that really needed communicating in a tactical context.

Unfortunately you could only find so many semi-charred and blown apart corpses of clearly unarmed sapient beings before you had to add “Someone has to pay for this” or “there will be blood” to the lexicon and military hand-signals didn’t have any such gestures. Doakes signaling, from up in a tree, that he’d sighted a larger settlement up ahead.

The small team made it closer, hiding around the forest edge as they approached the enemy settlement. Adisa was crouched, tense, as she took in the scene. The enemy soldiers were in their armor, and there were a dozen buildings inside a perimeter that was marked with quick-deploy durasteel cover positions and sniper towers. Eight of them were long, about three stories high, and only lightly fortified. Another was low-slung and heavily built. A handful of the enemy forces forced a small group of the locals inside and slammed the heavy door. There were two buildings that looked similar to pyramids of some kind. The last building was the largest, heavily fortified, and multiple weapons teams were positioned in each window.

Adisa signaled her team to pull back, and asked for options.

“Keep up observation would be my vote, Sergeant.” Shaed was the first to speak, his eerily quiet, slithering voice clearly audible, now that they were at a safe distance.

“Extract the prisoners.” That was Owens. Adisa shook her head. “There’s five of us. No heavy weapons. There’s at least eighty of them. No way are we risking a direct contact fight.”

Doakes shrugged. “Your call, Sarge.” Adisa rolled her eyes. Doakes was great, but he was one of nature’s seconds. Prian paused. “We have options. I vote with the explosives specialist if we get the chance. For now, we keep an eye on things.”

Adisa nodded. This was going to be a long mission.

***

Over the next few weeks, Adisa and her team kept an eye on their targets. More of the Gehnkl were ushered into the low-slung building, and no sooner was she fairly convinced that these things, whatever they were, were running a space-age concentration camp, something new happened.

The enemy soldier in the crimson-trimmed armor stood before a group of his species, smaller than the ones the team had seen to date, and wearing some sort of biohazard gear, and spoke to them. “Esharioc lagion emi trint, ul brastus.” He handed out weapons to them, more of the horrifying weapons they’d seen used earlier. Was this some sort of training exercise for young warriors? And what did Esharioc mean? Species name for itself? Adisa took mental note, she’d have something to report.

The doors of the bunker opened, and the Gehnkl began trickling out, looking nervous as weapons were thrown at their feet. Small knives, mostly, but still. The officer – assumed to be an officer, at least – spoke again, gesturing at the enemy. “Vanct. Crinoch ata.”

The young Esharioc raised their weapons and screamed, opening fire into the crowd and blasting the prisoners apart as the group scrambled for weapons and began attempting to rush them. A handful of young Esharioc were seized and thrown down, even as their would-be killers were blown apart.

The massacre was short but horrifying. The Esharioc lost two young warriors but the entire prisoner stalk was massacred in a matter of minutes. The officer spoke again. “Varis! Esharioc lagion emii, varis.”

The tone seemed to convey that that was a compliment, though once again Adisa couldn’t be sure. She was still numb from what she had just witnessed. What insane species taught its children to slaughter other sapient beings en masse, willing to sacrifice a handful in the process? What the fuck were these things? And…damn, at this rate she was going to want to put some explosives and do some damage just to get some recorders to see if they could get an audio database to see if they could get some read on the enemy language.

What the hell were the Esharioc and why the fuck were they doing this?


	6. First Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tiger Squadron - the new version - engages the enemy. The reference to Caesar refers to Julius Caesar's favored tactics during the conquest of Gaul

Ywyn sat in the cockpit of the Rakshasa. The system was clearly not designed for an Ivari, despite the Palnt engineers doing what they could to make it survivable for something with hollow bones, she knew she was still going to feel the inertia in ways that humans didn’t have to worry about. She’d drilled in the thing though. She wouldn’t pass out now that she was finally in the squadron she’d been trying to enlist in for over a standard decade. It wasn’t going to be pleasant to engage in some of the faster maneuvers they went for, but it was going to be doable.

Dastn y’Tas, the commanding officer of Hunter’s Apex, was audible on the comms. He’d been captured by Tiger Squadron, during the same war that had finally seen the capture of Tiger Squadron founders Callie and Jake Andala. “Remember the doctrine we worked out. Lion Fleet and Imperial shield are taking point. Apex hits the enemy fighter cover.” Amelia continued, “And Tiger Squadron starts a hard snub-fighter attack to cripple enemy capital ships before breaking off to engage the fighters.”

Lt. Admiral Hendrix broke in. “Allow Lion Fleet to enter the fray first, we’re designed to take a lot of pounding. Let the Imperial Shield crash in and shatter whatever capital ships they can in the shock of onset.”

The attack on the invaders began with Amelia drawing in a deep breath and taking part in a tradition her retired heroes had handed her. “Tiger Squadron, FANGS OUT!”

****

The combined unit dropped out of hyperspace as planned and almost immediately engaged, hard and brutal. Hendrix let her fleet’s shields take the worst of it. The blasts were impressive, draining shields faster than just about any enemy she’d ever gone up against, some of the projectiles impacting the armor systems, harder than anything she’d seen before.

Unfortunately for the enemy, “draining shields faster than anything she’d ever seen” or “impacting armor harder than anything she’d ever seen” didn’t mean “fast or hard enough to be a threat.” Her flagship was called the Nemean for a reason. Lieutenant Hanes was focusing on a few critical fire control zones while Hendrix kept her eyes on the larger battle, beginning to order her corvettes into a reticulan formation with the backup of destroyers, while the Imperial shield fell on the enemy’s harshly angled dreadnaughts like the mailed fist of some forgotten battle deity.

The Keldebriar ships weren’t designed for endurance. They were designed to come in fast, blast you to quivering shreds before you could react, then jump away, and repeatedly re-enter the battlefield like that. Two massive dreadnaught analogues were shattered before the enemy commander could respond by deploying his fighter swarms, and both Star Apex and Tiger Squadron blazed through the void to meet them.

***

Captain Amelia Minas led her squadron into a complex helix assault on the enemy dreadnaught attempting to bring its guns to bear against the Keldebriar weapons. The enemy weapons were deflected by the shields the Rakshasas had, but their shields seemed to work on a different system than the Keldebriar’s or Vulpexi’s had. The usual trick of using a fighter’s shields to get inside enemy shields and launch attacks too close in for a capital ship’s defenses to intercept was working to some degree, but it was interfering with the handling, adding directional resistances and pulls that the pilots hadn’t encountered before. A dozen Tiger Squadron pilots died as they struggled to adapt, causing others to pull out and engage in the wider melee of the battle with the enemy fighters as the Keldebriar Apex tore the enemy’s fighters to shred with their delayed arrival and the shock of their assault.

Amelia, however, carried on the attack on the enemy destroyer she was attacking, having spotted where the enemy’s torpedoes were emerging from and managed to get an antimatter torpedo into the firing tubes before wheeling away to engage another target, a corvette this time, as the target’s own munitions sympathetically detonated, eventually setting off a meltdown of what Amelia assumed was the core reactor.

***

“Commander, missile frigates penetrating enemy shields. None of the target zones are being impacted as intended but the enemy ships are suffering significant damage. Keldebriar force pulling out for a second onset cycle, deploying Bravo group destroyers to engage enemy corvette analogs.”

“10-4, get Corvette sections Delta and Charlie to sweep around that moon and cut off the assault on our missile frigates contingent. Cruiser section Alpha to support the Delta and Alpha destroyer unit in the assault on enemy dreadnaughts.”

Shiloh Hendrix and XO Hanes spitting out a back and forth of orders and collaborative commands as Lion Fleet held the enemy in position and brutally herded them into the dispersive clusters of ships that were brutally pounced on and completely wiped out one by one by the Imperial Shield Fleet’s repeated cycles of assault, driving attack, and withdrawal to the outer edge of the system.

***

Ywyn was glorying in the battle. This was what she’d been looking for since the tail end of the action in the Vulpexi war. Action during the Marauder Extermination War in the Carsai sector campaign hadn’t counted. Fighting, finally, alongside Tiger Squadron and the rest of the greatest star pilots in the galaxy against a genocidal attacker…THAT was the kind of action she’d been dreaming of since she’d enlisted in the Hegemonic Star Guard.

The brutality of the inertia was hard but as one of the Ivari, whose people’s name for itself meant “Star borne Survivors” the three dimensional thinking that starfighter combat demanded had come far more easily for her than it had to her human comrades, and whatever the enemy were, they hadn’t evolved to be flyers.

Plunging through space, perpendicular to the formations arrayed against her new people, Ywyn began twisting in motion, whipping and gliding with almost instinctive adjustments to the rotating thrusters that the Rakshasa allowed for, firing whenever one of the enemy fighters found itself in her crosshairs. She shot a few of the knifelike enemy craft off her squadron mates and found herself thrilling at the acceptance she heard in their responses. “Thanks for the bailout, Punkhawk, cover my six on this next strike.”

Among her own people, her infertility had led to her social rejection. With the Ivari so few, always, and a favored target of the Sclunter for whatever reason, the inability to bring more into the universe was considered unfortunate, and until the rise of the Hegemony, the knowledge that the Galri had technology that could fix the problem was kept hidden out of a stubborn refusal to accept help.

Here, among Tiger Squadron, she’d gotten the callsign, “Punkhawk” which derived from her unique feather dye job, which apparently reminded the humans of a certain subculture of their own. She enjoyed the nickname, and snapped out, “10-4, Sticks, watch for that point defense.”

“Been here since the Synthor fight, these fuckers have nothing on the Borg.” At some point, she was going to get that reference explained, but crippling the target they were up against took priority.

The Keldebriar Hunter’s Apex dropped in again, scything through the enemy fighters with an unbelievable efficiency, taking them out with rapid strikes of two fighters working in tandem. “Tigers, coming in at 65 elevation bearing, at your seven.” 

The invader pilots were talented and lethal, in fact, Amelia reflected as she wheeled into position alongside her wing mate yet again, the invader would have been at a slight advantage against normal human, Keld, or Ivari pilots. Against Tiger Squadron or Star Apex?

Not a chance in hell.

***

The harbingers or their allies were rapidly devastating his fleet, the Inquisitor realized. He sent out a signal of distress to gain the assistance of the wider Canton, but the response made him twist in dismay, before swelling in pride.

“Inquisitor. We have no aid to send you. Your death, however, shall buy us time to get into position to sweep this second fleet as ably as you swept the first. In the name of our people’s crusade, you and your forces are hereby martyred with highest honor. Your sacrifice will grant the Esharioc our greatest hope of survival. Your names will be forever venerated.”

The Esharioc commander felt his thorax swell with pride, and roared an order. “All forces, in position. We hold to death, that their shields be sundered by our grand crusade! OPEN FIRE!!”

***

Hendrix had an instinct as the enemy forces pushed in a renewed counterstroke that forced her battleships into a more vulnerable position as they pounded away at the enemy flagship, even with the Keldebriar’s own furious assaults driving back sectors of the enemy fleet and both elite squadrons tearing apart the enemy fighter component, the enemy counter seemed brazen, fanatical, and was bending her formations out of position.

Silvanus was noticing as well, despite the advantage they clearly possessed the enemy were absolutely planning on something.

Half a thousand new enemy signatures dropping out of hyperspace confirmed that, and Hendrix spat out a long string of orders that resulted in a sheet of covering fire being placed over her outermost forces while the squadrons wheeled to engage the new enemy and Hendrix thought over what had happened.

The fleet they’d come to engage had been destroyed almost to the last fighter but they were now engaged from almost every possible vector with minimal options. An old book, far predating gunpowder, much less FTL, came to her.

“When the enemy has you surrounded on all sides, concentrate your forces and strike with all your might against one element of theirs you may surround on three sides, allowing you to escape encirclement and repay the intended damage with interest.”

The Imperial Shield was still outside the encirclement. “Do Caesar one better then,” she muttered, sending the coordinates of what she had planned to the Keldebriar.

No sooner had the noose truly begun to tighten than the Shield dropped in behind the largest enemy backup contingent and ripped through them from six different vectors as Lion Fleet, Tiger Squadron and the Apex tore through them from an additional nine, the combined Hegemonic fleet withdrawing, forced to acknowledge tactical defeat at the hands of whatever the invaders were.

But unlike last time, the enemy had learned not to underestimate them, and had been thoroughly punished and mauled for the attack on the Rim.


	7. Recon Turned Raid

The mixed-species Viper team had been roving the jungle, scoping out the enemy, and fed them back to Ritia on the stealth insertion ship, who then fed them back to Vulpexi and Ivari programmed linguistic mainframes which were rapidly crunching the work of attempting to translate the enemy’s speech as well as to the military heads in the Tyrsian, human, and Keldebriar command structures, who attempted to analyze the tactics and strategies they were seeing.

Unfortunately, after three weeks of stealthing, spying, and seeing far too many Gehnkl slaughtered while they were unable to interfere, new orders had come in.

_ Sgt. Adisa: _

_ In order to determine our best course of action against the enemy, and allow us to develop armor systems capable of withstanding their weaponry, we require you to obtain the following materials: a piece of their armor, one of their projectile weapons, and tissue samples of the enemy personnel. _

Fuck. They had thus far killed none of the enemy forces, but they’d also taken no casualties. Adisa had accepted the misery of the former for preserving the comfort of the latter, but the new orders left no hope of maintaining that situation.

She went over the new orders with her team. Shaed gave no outward indication of his feelings but then acknowledgement of fear was not the Tenebrac way. Prian was less concealed, his ears flattening back against his skull and his fur sticking up as he hissed, “Then we have been found expendable. I will preform my duty.”

Doakes was quiet. “We might be able to get in and out with a little stolen material and only slip out of the worst of it.” The sniper’s voice was calm, detached. It was the voice of a man who knew he was probably dead, not terribly interested in denying the fact, but one who believed it was still possible to get out alive.

Owens, the youngest of the team, twenty-five years old, turned to Adisa. “Hey, I swore an oath. Rights of all sapient life. This is a genocidal force. I’ve been itching to go up against them since we got inserted.”

Adisa winced. One idealist, once optimist, two professionals, and one honor-bound warrior who accepted impending doom. And it was her job to accomplish the mission while keeping as many of them as possible alive.

“Alright. Let’s see if we can figure out a viable plan to get in, save those Gehnkl if we can, get what material we need, and make an exit before things get too fucked up.”

***

The planning session had gone well. Diversionary charges set on the large, temple-like structures, and three of the barracks, as well as a breaching charge on the prison structure to allow the Gehnkl to escape when the attack started. Doakes was up in one of the massive trees, his precision gauss rifle ready as he began plotting targets.

Shaed slithered close to the entrance positions of the compound, his chromatic skin camouflaging him into the jungle terrain, his monomolecular edged knives at the ready to neutralize the enemy troops in the bunker by the gate when the fighting started. The bombs would go off and collapse the barracks first, hopefully taking a majority of enemy forces out of the fight before it started, and when the sentries in the towers turned to investigate that, Doakes would neutralize them while Shaed took care of the units in the bunker. When that officer came out, Doakes would take him down while Adisa, Priam, and Owens hit the armory.

The plan started off without a hitch.

The barracks buildings exploded, disappearing in bursts of micronuclear fire, with scores of enemy troops in the surviving structures pouring out to save their comrades…

Doakes dropped the sentries and took the shot at the officer, who promptly joined his brethren in repose…

The three guards at the gate jumped as two of them slumped to the ground with knives in their spines at Shaed’s greeting and the third followed seconds later. Adisa swept into the camp, Owens’ laser quickly sweeping would-be assailants off their flanks while she and Prian mowed down any surviving opponents in view with quick, sharp bursts from the subguns. “Owens, take down the door, we’ll cover you.”

“Got it, Sarge!” The young man set the breaching charges on the enemy armory and Shaed’s voice rasped through the comms, “Tissue samples secure.”

Doakes swore from up in his perch. “Mamba, get hauling. There’s more coming in.” The armory door was down, Adisa sprinted inside and grabbed one of the enemy rifles and one of their helmets and threw the latter in her bag, slinging the other, far longer weapon across her back. “Let’s move!”

She heard Owen’s laser activate and heard enemy screams, followed by the soft thump of the breaching charges installed on the prison building going off. Doakes was still swearing in the comms. Pulling Owens and signaling to Prian and Shaed, Adisa took position by the exit to the compound as the hypersonic crack of Doakes’ sniper rifle almost deafened her, seeing an Esharioc soldier drop to the ground, spinning as the round impacted its heart. A small unit began pinning down the spec ops team with concentrated fire, even as Doakes thinned that unit, Adisa realized that the reinforcements the sniper had seen would be there before they were out of range.

Owens cut loose with a burst of his laser on maximum power, scything through enemy cover and soldiers alike. “Get outta here, Sarge. I’ll cover you and the pris-“ He caught fire and exploded, violently, made worse by the explosives he was carrying being set off by whatever the enemy weapons were.

The blast gave cover, however, and though she hated to leave the body there, she and the rest of her team took advantage of the moment to flee further into the jungle, Doakes distributing relativistic retribution to the Esharioc soldier who’d slain Owens. Those strange, silent pulse-blasts that the enemy favored flickered around them, lighting fires in the trees and bursting metal structures where they impacted but it was clear that the enemy were firing blind through the chaos that Owens’ death had left.

Pounding enemy footsteps followed and Prian hit the enemy from the flank. The Esharioc were big. They were strong. From what the Vipers had seen, the enemy had endurance nearly on par with that of humans. But Keldebriar had evolved as stealth/sprint predators and god himself could not survive having one leap from ambush, knives flashing. The decapitated enemy soldiers’ weapons hit the ground at the same time as their heads.

Flicking the foul-smelling clear blood of his blades, Prian spat, “Payment for my comrade, monsters.”

Adisa’s eyes gave no indication of her mood, but she was screaming with rage at the death of Owens, a young man who’d come so far and overcome the brainwashing he’d had as a child to want to help everyone, brutally murdered by these things.

Doakes’ rifle sounded again, but a blast into that tree sent him…bits of him…raining down. 

The recon unit was forced to withdraw, running, ducking behind trees and throwing grenades, firing from cover and leaping out to slash throats. It was easy to follow the trail the Viper team had left in its wake – one needed only follow the bodies – but pursuit was difficult through this terrain, an ecosystem the Esharioc had not come from.

Prian, Shaed and Adisa fled through the jungle, eventually getting out far enough from their pursuers as they requested immediate evacuation from Ritia that they could catch their breath. Prian was slowing down, and Shaed was lagging badly. Adisa was panting with the exertion of what had occurred so far, but the endurance of her species would have allowed her to go at least a few more klicks before she’d really needed to stop.

More Esharioc units approached as Ritia’s response came in.

Shaed flung himself into the muck, going prone, where Adisa crouched behind a tree as Prian got ready to pounce one more time. Ritia’s ship was plunging downward, through the atmosphere, and Adisa got ready for the final fight.

Shaed stepped out from the muck and disemboweled the trailing Esharioc. Prian’s blades flashed and more enemy soldiers fell. Adisa dived across the penultimate enemy’s back and slithered across, blade glinting as the nearly-decapitated alien soldier slumped into the muck. While not the equal of a Keld in melee combat, the Mamba felt like she should prove that humans were no slouches with a blade.

The final Esharioc drew its own blade and rapidly realized it couldn’t take all three of them at once, so it threw the blade, unslung its rifle, and activated its grenades. Adisa cursed. Moving away from the grenade blast would also push them out of cover, which was what it was almost certainly waiting for. And whoever poked their head up first would die…

The antigravity repulsors on the extraction ship shoved the last Esharioc far enough away that his attempted suicide bombing had little effect, and the bloodied, ragged, and mud caked team threw themselves aboard as Ritia took off.

“Hope you figured something out, Adisa. The war got a lot more intense. Full blitz on the Rim.”


	8. Next In Line

Dalafer had come out to the Epomi colony in the aftermath of Kyriion Crisis. His clan, Pilina, had been ravaged by Vulpexi slavers during the Dominion era, and after they’d returned home, they’d been finished by Kyriion.

Dalafer had been one of the lucky ones. Well, “lucky.” Without a clan, Nathians had no real purpose, as he now knew all too well. He’d been offered a place in a few others but he had chosen to surround himself with the Epomi for a time, instead. During the Marauder War he’d served in the Hegemonic Guard, almost as a form of passive suicide, an attempt to rejoin his clan.

Now though…it wasn’t just the memory of his loss that haunted him. He remembered stepping onto battlefields on Carsai III, and remembered being carried away from them, covered in blood not his own. He had flashes of taking a vibroblade to Sclunter, in a fit of panicked rage, but not much more than that.

Panic attacks in the aftermath of that fight had wracked him for quite some time, leading to his honorable discharge and being told that the Veteran resettlement department could find a home for him either among his own people, and when he refused that, a home on a Rimward farm with the Epomi.

Dalafer was working around the farm. Despite the massive advances of tech, agriculture was one of those jobs that still required large amounts of manual labor. Better tools now than when species first started farming, but still. Manual or by personally operated machine. His paws worked quickly as he stripped the fruit from the plants and safely stored it. The harvest was always the busiest, but the monotony allowed him to feel calm, safe, in a way that he hadn’t since…

Well. Since everything.

The Epomi were even more timid than he was, and had been frightened of him at first. Still, as time went on, they’d come to accept him. Twist the stem off, lower the fruit into the sack.

There were other Nathians on this colony, farming, teaching, living. A handful of Palnt and Dembra, who really were needed if you wanted top-quality machining or construction in the Hegemony. And of course this being a world with so much life on it the Galri had a presence as well. The Vulpexi had offered to come and learn, however he and many of the Epomi had absolutely refused, along with many of the Galri. Peace was good, but many on the colony had little more than trauma associated with the Vulpexi, and remembered the Dominion with hate. The Vulpexi colonists, to their credit, had set up an isolated settlement where they could farm and set up their industry for themselves, allowing themselves to mingle, but only on terms that those their former government had harmed would be comfortable with.

Dalafer, for his part, was starting to understand the situation. The Vulpexi who’d taken his clan before the war, before Kyriion, had long since been slaughtered by humanity. That didn’t get rid of the bad memories, and the new rulership of the molluscoids seemed eager to make amends, but it would take time. He spoke rarely as he worked. He and a dear friend, a Galri Aid Corps psychologist named Kaisa, had a meet-up scheduled for tonight. Like him, xe carried a lot of survivor’s guilt about things xe’d seen while a Sclunter captive. Despite that, xe’d been one of the life forges who’d volunteered to aid the Sclunter in overcoming the evolutionary tragedy that drove them to be what they were.

Kaisa hadn’t been sent, which was fortunate. Those who went had been attacked, and often killed, by the Sclunter, and in response, all aid sent to them had been cancelled, and the order came down from the Hegemonic authorities: the Sclunter were biologically unable to have peace, and refused to allow the Galri to help them escape this. Thus, they were to be destroyed.

Dalafer had enlisted not long before that, almost as a form of passive suicide after the loss of his clan, and he’d done his duty in the Marauder War. After finding himself blacking out and covered in blood more than once during that time, he’d applied for psychiatric discharge and been granted it.

The workday came to a close, and he moved to meet with Kaisa, who greeted him with an embrace, the Galri towering over xer diminutive friend. The two talked for some time, not just about the goings-on of the farm on Dalafer’s end or the goings on of the Hegemony’s growing pains.

Or the rumors that there was another war coming. Kiasa was still in Aid Corps, so xe’d heard some information about the Esharioc. “Aid Corps knows very little beyond that we’re getting to help us talk to the refugees, but we don’t know a whole lot about the enemy. Some of the Gehnkl survivors are being brought here, getting settled for a while. Hopefully the enemy will be repelled once the Hegemony’s military can strike them, but we still aren’t sure where they came from.”

Dalafer cringed. “Why would we want to know that?” He said, tightly. He knew the answer. Humans waged war harshly. They’d taught that lesson to the Vulpexi, Kilicks, and Sclunter.

Kaisa could tell where his head was. “You know why. And you know as well as I do, or better, that the Sclunter and Kilicks gave no better choice.”

Dalafer spat, hating that xe was right, hating what he’d done.

Before the silence could get too long, he asked another question. “Are the refugee ships being followed? If the enemy are anything like the Sclunter, those will be a target.”

“No such issues so far. A friend of mine in the Guard says this planet and a few others that are getting refugees are going to be getting more heavy garrisons to defend against possible enemy follow-up, and more evacuation infrastructure.”

“Homeward scorch,” Dalafer swore, one of the more dire oaths for a Nathian, and then asked, “Do they think that’s likely to be necessary?”

“They hit Gehnkl really hard, so it makes sense to be cautious.” Kiasa had had to grow cells to regenerate Gehnkl with truly horrific injuries, young and old alike. Whatever the Esharioc were after, their brutality truly tested the Galri’s oath of pacifism and compassion.

Alarms started blaring. “Unknown ships detected in sector. All civilians report to assigned safe zones and all Guard units, to your ships or battle stations. Prepare to defend.” 


	9. Public Announcement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake and Callie gear up again

“Citizens of the United Hegemony of Free Species.” The head of state was speaking, thinking on the news she was about to deliver, nervous about doing so. The people did not want another war, but in the aftermath of two major battles and an ongoing genocide on Gehnkl, it seemed wise to prepare. “We have, as an alliance, seen and struggled through much. The Kyriion outbreaks, the Synthor Crisis, the Dominion and Marauder Wars. Now, we face a new threat. A new enemy of unknown origin, known as the Esharioc, has assaulted a number of worlds on the Rim, massacring the populace, often destroying cities and building their own structures. Their motives are unclear, however, we know that they are extremely dangerous. One fleet of theirs has been destroyed, after destroying a star guard patrol fleet, and only Lion Fleet’s attack destroyed them, only for Lion Fleet to be forced to retreat from reinforcing fleets.”

The Head of State paused, then spoke again. “Refugees are rushing Core-ward from three different worlds on the Rim, attempting to flee the slaughter. Elite units of the Hegemonic Guard are engaging already, however, the reports they are sending back reveal that the enemy numbers are massive. While our people have sought peace, and are war-weary after the last few conflicts, the heartbreaking reality is that we are at war once more, and we need to stand as one against this onslaught. Military forces will prepare to mobilize and production will be shifted to a wartime footing. We will meet this assault and drive it back, driving them away and securing the rights for all sapient life that this Hegemony is founded upon. We will defeat this latest assault on our people, we will rebuild, and we will build a galaxy in which we may all live in peace. But for today, we must stand together, and declare that we will fight to protect our own.”

***

Jake and Callie were watching the newscasts and cringing. Another war. They were civilians now, but they still made the grade for Tiger Squadron pilots, and were likely to be called back up. They were looking at each other, hands clenched tightly, knuckles turning white as they clenched. Tony was running around. He wasn’t yet old enough to understand what was going on, what it meant, that Mommy and Daddy were likely to be called back up and away from him. Alicia knew that there was a war again, but she didn’t know everything that came with it.

Callie spoke first. “We have to explain it to the kids.”

Jake looked down, and then met her gaze. “Yeah, we do.” They sat down and began speaking.

“Kids, there’s something that you should know about this announcement. We’re out of the military, but we still rate well enough as pilots to re-enlist in our old squadron, and if the war gets as bad as the command structure apparently thinks it might…we might have to go back.”

Tony grinned. “You’re going to be hero pilots again? That’s so cool!”

Alicia was only seven, but she understood the gravity of the situation. “They’ll have to go away if that happens.” She looked up into their eyes. “Can we come with you? So we don’t have to stay here alone?”

Jake winced. “I don’t think either of you would want to stay on the carrier. It’s well lit, loud, and there are no other kids there. And regulations are pretty clear that there can’t be children on any combat craft unless it’s for evacuation. I don’t know yet what happens if we get called back up, but I think you’d be taken care of by relatives until the war is over. In your case that’d be the clan that took us in.”

That brought a fresh wave of horror to Callie. Were they going to die in the cold void of space, leaving their children without them, like…

Like their own had.

“It’ll be okay, guys.” Callie hugged her children, and a split second later, Jake joined in. They were both lying, of course. The same lie their parents had told them, boarding the horizons, thirty-six standard years ago. “No matter what happens, we’ll make sure you’re safe.”

***

Rudi Ceris watched the Hegemon’s address from his home in the Alpha Centuari system. He knew his brother Marcus had been tense the last few weeks, running more and more drills with Wolf Division. The war now being announced was on the opposite side of the Core, more than half the galaxy away, but it was still coming. Rudi wasn’t a soldier. His compulsory service had been done with the Educational Corps, not the military. Rudi reached for the ansible, preparing to contact that researcher he’d worked with, Endirmas, to see if there was anything they could do.

******

The drills were starting up. Jake and Callie started drilling with the Rakshasas much more regularly, and regained a lot of the skill that they had forgotten. The kids kept going to school, now drilling more and more regularly in evacuation and safety-bunker drills.

***

A small crusader unit, a stealth force, prepared a strike. The system they were heading for was the capitol world of the multi-species plague breeding ground that this galaxy was populated with. The cleansing would be thorough, but first, a bombing would send them a message. We cannot move great forces around your interdictor systems, but we send small raids to devastate you regardless.

The strike would cost the small unit their lives, but to advance the crusade of survival, it was a sacrifice they were only too eager to pay. The Imperator had spoken that according to the information they had, the plague-bearers held cooperation and unity, exchange as their highest ideals. The capitol world, the symbol of the ideal, would burn first to send a message of what the People thought of that. 


	10. No Safe Haven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bombing run comes at the worst possible time

[recommended music for the fight:  [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzWizk3e4MM ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzWizk3e4MM) ]

Despite the news trickling in about the war, Jake and Callie’s day-to-day lives were mostly untouched. The kids were a handful, but that was nothing new. They were continuing to drill in their Rakshasas, which they’d be back in for emergency defense if the Esharioc showed up at Haven.

Alicia was talking to Tony. “I really want to try going up in the Rakshasas. Mom and Dad say there’s a back seat they use for training new pilots. Don’t you want to see how they lived, as the leaders of Tiger Squadron?”

“I’m not sure, Alicia. They seem really scared of flying again.”

“They’re scared of fighting in a war again. They still love flying, you’ve heard them talking about it. We’ll just ask them if they’ll take us up.”

“You sure, Alicia? They might get mad.”

“Come on, we can just ask.” Alicia had made up her mind. She’d been in space before, but only on a hauler ship, never in a Rakshasa. Tony hadn’t even had that, he’d been born on Haven.

“You’ll love it, Tony. Don’t you want to see the stars?” Tony knew his older sister was after something, but the idea of flying around with his parents like they had in the old movies…

He was in.

***

Jake and Callie were in the bedroom, looking at each other. Dealing with the news of another war on the horizon was, for them, a process. They were both familiar with each other’s bodies, of course. You couldn’t hold someone for that many nights and not be familiar. Still, it was good to look once in a while. Jake had ridges of scar tissue along his ribcage, where new flesh had had to be grown in the aftermath of gamma blasts from the Dominion guns. Callie’s flesh was still pitted, here and there, with the scars that Kyriion had left her. Both of them carried the seams of scar tissue from the three crash landings they’d survived, and a few wounds from that Sclunter warboss who had gotten his fighters aboard the Khan.

Jake smiled at Callie. “What do you think? Think we’re up for another round?”

“Heh. You?”

Smiling like a tiger, Jake leaned in to kiss her when the door started rattling with the force of their children pounding on it. Throwing their clothing back on quickly, the two veteran pilots and novice parents opened the door. “What’s going on?”

“Tony and I just wanted to ask, since the Rakshasas have backseats used for training junior pilots new to the system, could you take us the next time you go for a drill, just so we can see how it feels to fly?”

Callie paused. The panic attack that seized her heart at the idea of her children flying in the stars, inside a fighter, was one she was absolutely not ready for. They wanted to try what…

Jake started laughing. It wasn’t a happy laugh, but a broken one. Pride, love, joy, worry, excitement, heartbreak, bittersweet memory all intermingled, mixed with lunacy. “I don’t know, Callie, are you okay with it?”

“Kids, wait in the living room. Your father and I need to talk.”

Once the kids had left the room, she turned back to Jake. “You have thoughts about this.”

“I do. They want to see the stars. Just like…”

“Yeah, just like we did at that age. Goddamnit, and they still look up and see possibilities. Let’s…let’s show them what the galaxy should be.”

***

Three hours later, Tony was strapped in, heavily to a point when so much as twitching would be difficult, to the training seat of the cockpit, and Alicia sat behind her mother. Deciding to play into it a little bit, Jake flicked the comms on. “Lt. Andala, we are ready for liftoff.”

“10-4, Ensign. Initiating in t-minus five seconds. Go black and follow with barrel rolls and corkscrews. Alicia, sound off.”

“Ready.”

“Tony, sound off.”

“Ready!”

“Liftoff!” cranking up the music as the actinic flares of the thrusters erupted, the tiger-striped fighters screaming into the sky, the excited screams of children and symphonic metal mixing to get Jake and Callie’s heartrates pumping. “Alright, check this out.” Cranking the thrusters to the side and barrel rolling, followed by flicker maneuvers, corkscrews, loop-d’-loops, and complex maneuvers that had their children wincing in fear before screaming in delight had Jake and Callie laughing when the alarms started blaring.

A flash of some sort of energy weapon flashed past the cockpit of Callie’s fighter. “Jake, we have some hostiles coming in.”

Jake managed not to swear in front of the kids, who didn’t know how much trouble they were in. “Got it. Pulling back to surface to drop the kids, then we’ll rendezvous with patrol squadrons and finish this.”

Callie was already sending a warning signal to the planetary defenses, and shortly, other defensive squadrons came up, even as Jake and Callie swept into desperate evasive maneuvers. Risking oneself was fine, risking one’s children was not. All the same, they were struggling to retreat to drop their children somewhere safe before re-engaging, but the enemy forces weren’t permitting it.

“Jake, we’re going to have to fight our way out.”

He took a deep breath, desperately realizing that both Alicia and Tony were starting to panic, and injected all the confidence he could into his voice. “TIGER SQUADRON, FANGS OUT!”

Swinging his fighter into full bearing on one of the enemy ships, he stroked the first trigger group for the mass drivers, tearing the target apart, and swept away as Callie pasted a follow-up unit. More squadrons blasted into the outer orbit and began ripping into the enemy craft, but an alarm message screamed from the surface.

“Squadrons, heavy bomber craft engaging ground targets on haven, all units not decisively engaged, please eliminate them, preferably with less powerful weaponry to avoid detonating them in the upper atmosphere.”

The Rakshasas actually had nothing that could do that, but if the enemy were on a bombing run…

“Jake, we may need to retreat, get the kids somewhere safe, and come back.”

Alicia screamed. “No, our friends are down there, no way we’re leaving them to get bombed!”

Goddamnit, talk about a pickle. This wasn’t their problem, they weren’t even formal military anymore, just volunteer militia that had spent an absurd amount of money to keep their old craft. But they didn’t want to model running away from people who needed you to the kids…and despite their concern, neither Jake nor Callie could deny they were damn proud of their children for wanting to protect their friends.

And more than that…both the pilots were nothing short of livid at yet another set of enemies attacking their home yet again. They keyed the weapon systems again. “Fangs out.”

Callie blasted into her comms, “Patrol units, this is Tiger Squadron splinter group, prepare to break off and deal with those bombers, we are engaging.”

The two Rakshasas screamed across the hollow void of space, still blaring their music through the comms, and the two master pilots proceeded to remind everyone why they had once been the most feared starfighters in the galaxy. Dozens of Esharioc craft were blasted apart in a matter of minutes, not expecting their dogfights to be interrupted by the sudden assault of two other fighters.

The bombers were descended upon and dealt with as the patrol squadrons “Went blue” or dropped back into the atmosphere, the Keldebriar one especially brutalizing the bombers while human pilots continued to brutalize the Esharioc in space.

Dismounting their craft and hugging Tony and Alicia, Jake and Callie faced a revelation.

The enemy had gotten through the defense perimeter. No safe haven existed. To protect their family, they had only one place to go. Unto the breach once more.


	11. Wolf Pack

Audio file:  [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj2vU2nr5Jw ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj2vU2nr5Jw)

Kaisa cursed as the horrible, bladelike ships of the enemy began descending, and began sending orders for evacuation. Xe gave a cry, a singular piercing note, and xer coralglider swooped down and began setting down near the nearby school. Kaisa stood up and gripped Dalafer’s paw. “I’m going to go evacuate civilian kids. Gather up anyone you can and get to a civilian bunker.”

Dalafer nodded, already in motion, grabbing as many Epomi as possible as the Hegemonic Guard scrambled around and armed themselves, quickly attempting to organize the panicked crowds as the enemy forces began stepping out of the ships and firing into the crowd. It was Dalafer’s first sight of the Esharioc. The sloping heads, the brutal, utilitarian armor, the silvery-chrome weapons and enormous blades strapped to their backs.

Dalafer was not a coward. He was timid, but there was a difference between that and cowardice. Pushing the Epomi as quickly as he could, shouting directions to the bunker as the quadrupedal beings surged away from the horrific slaughter. The noises, the screams, the creepy semi-silent blasts that tore living beings apart and left only flaming gore where once there had been living things. Against the sights and sounds and the scents of burning flesh and organs never meant to be exposed to open air torn asunder by fire all he could do was withdraw to the shelters and hope the Guard could manage.

***

The Hegemonic Guard fired into the massing enemy forces, the megawatt lasers scything through the enemy’s armor, gauss rounds and plasma bolts hitting the enemy and sending several of them spinning to the ground. It was Corporal Joan Bonhuer’s third battle. She’d seen some action against pirates during a few brushfire fights around the edges of the Marauder war, but this was the first time she’d faced off against power-armored opponents.

She’d vaulted for cover upon their arrival and began firing her gauss rifle in quick, controlled bursts as she’d been trained to. Oh, Joan had trained with this thing on the firing range but this was the first time she’d used it in an actual battle, in previous engagements her issued primary weapon had been a plasma rifle.

Still, it was reassuring to see those creepy invaders stumble and fall as her rounds found their mark. The armor seemed to be pretty thick but the area right below the shoulders seemed to be the point where multiple plates came together in a seam, and was therefore vulnerable.

The enemy seemed to primarily use energy weapons, but there were absolutely projectile ones in the mix as well, based on the chips blown off of buildings as the firefight continued. “Jones, get the megawatt laser set up.” The LT was ordering them to pull back to the next defensive line now that the civvies were clear from this area and hold the next echelon, which had better positions and would concentrate their firepower more effectively.

Throwing a few grenades to keep the enemy busy, Joan rapped out orders, “Jones, belay that, squad pull back to secondary position. We have civvies to cover.”

****

The screen on the Lupa let Jaegar see clearly the beautiful world of Aldian IV, and the sharply angular black and chrome Esharioc ships now disgorging troops onto the planet. The Major General of Wolf Division had been given the briefing on the new threat, straight from Adisa’s reconnaissance report.

They were still waiting on more complete information to be disseminated from the analysis of the captured enemy weaponry but for now he had what he needed: The Esharioc were attacking a world claimed by the Hegemony of Free Worlds, and a group of fairly elite units had been sent to drive them off.

The Fleet contingent, not quite a full armada, that had been sent with them, was already preparing to engage the attackers in space, but Wolf Division and the Tyrsian Furies were about to drop to reinforce the defenders. He’d never thought he’d be dropping alongside Tyrsians, but the enemies of yesterday could easily become the friends of tomorrow if circumstances permitted.

Andonix was dropping with the Furies. The drop pods fired, sending the Hegemony’s elite ground forces plummeting down. The Keldebriar’s elite group, the “Primarch Legion” had been deployed to hunt and terrorize the enemy garrison on Gehnkl, in an effort to drive them off.

The pods impacted and the Wolves and Furies leapt into action. Literally Their jump packs allowed them to soar skyward into better positions, coming down and engaging with hand-to-hand weaponry to tear through Esharioc before they could react, throwing them into advantageous positions from which they began firing their weapons, beginning to drive the lithe aliens back.

***

Joan was quickly realizing that this enemy was not the Sclunter and was in fact, well trained, equipped and intelligent enough to make extremely effective use of cover. And she was getting pretty damn close to clocking out of gauss gun rounds. The enemy weren’t advancing, in fact her platoon was doing a fairly good job of keeping them suppressed, so the enemy couldn’t gain ground, but neither did the Guard unit have the ability to dislodge them. Her gauss rifle clocked out and she reached for another magazine before realizing that she was out. Realizing that the flachette pistol would be worthless against power-armored targets, she drew her lancer, the heavy-caliber, high-velocity weapon and crouched, waiting for the enemy to come closer.

***

Sgt. Marcus Ceris of Wolf Division saw the pinned down Guard platoon holding out valiantly as the Esharioc forces bore down on them, and it was to a flanking position against the Esharioc attackers that their “wings of fire” bore them down, the battle-hardened Wolf Division forces quickly overcoming the Esharioc, who struggled to draw melee weaponry quickly enough to stop the attack. “Guard, cavalry’s here. Hold your positions and keep any stragglers from touching the civvies, we’ll drive the fuckers back.”

***

Andonix was in his element, the furies blasting through Esharioc forces quickly, getting into melee and cutting them down. The Esharioc sometimes got their large and brutal shock blades out, occasionally able to down his comrades but more frequently than not succumbing to the deadliest hand-to-hand fighters in the galaxy.

“DRIVE THEM BACK!”

***

The battle was going mostly according to plan, though Jaegar was getting nervous about those massive armored vehicles. The guard’s artillery was having troublingly little effect, though he remembered the final campaign of the Vulpexi war well. “Wolf Division, Furies. See if you can get on top of those damn tanks and board them. Destroy the fucking things.” Andonix was in motion part way through that speech, vaulting skyward and descending hard onto the enemy armored vehicles, hacking the hatches open and throwing his grenades in to cripple the massive weapons.

Wolf Division and Fury Force were able to destroy the armor before swinging back into combat against the Esharioc infantry, who were slowly forced to retreat, the Guard supporting the Wolves’ counter-attack.

It wasn’t until the battle ended that it was discovered that the enemy had given the guard a hell of a mauling and had claimed several tens of thousands of civilian lives. 

Jaegar, however, had learned from the encounter. The enemy’s fire couldn’t always be drawn off of civilians and the enemy were clever, determined and far, far better trained than any previous enemy any of them had faced.


	12. Back Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ah, titles with double meanings.

Rudi Ceris, a historian and librarian, Brimas Blorgi, the intelligence officer from the Free Economic Zones, along with Corian, one of the Ivari astrographers who had been on the task force attempting to determine where the Esharioc were coming from so that the Hegemony could find them and force them to surrender. The person who’d commandeered Rudi’s library for the project was an intelligence analyst named Galina, who was watching the assorted experts argue about their findings.

“The communications signals that have been intercepted predominantly come from system in the barren sector.” Blorgi was speaking, going over the same point she’d been going over for hours. The communications that they had intercepted and traced, with unimpeachable precision, definitely led back to a three-system area in a sector rendered barren by Kyriion.

“Doesn’t track with the vectors. We’ve had stealth recon craft. Ritia is a renegade but she’s also a nigh-perfect stealth pilot. We sent her in with tracing gear and none of the vectors that are detectable indicate approach from anywhere near there.” Corian examined the data that the recon ships had discovered whilst investigating the trails of isotopes that were left in the wake of any traveling ship with functioning FTL. Corrian fully knew that Brimas was an unrivaled master of signal tracing and didn’t doubt her findings for an instant. He also didn’t doubt his own in regards to the jump tracking, nor the data collection abilities of those he’d hired to fly the data gathering ships.

Rudi wasn’t quite sure why he was here, actually. Beyond that he was known as a reasonably capable archive curator who happened to be living on Haven, and Brimas and Corian wanted to be able to work with an archivist. And he was convenient. Still, he felt they were both missing a critical possibility. “Corian, I need to ask you a question. Where do the travel vectors indicate they came from?”

“They seem to indicate that the Esharioc are actually coming from the rim, but not anywhere near the barren sector.”

“Is it possible that they’re using a barren sector world as a command center and fortified base but that the bulk of their forces are remaining in their ships?”

“It’s possible but we’ve gotten some reports in from the Palnt and Dembra who looked over the ships. They aren’t meant to carry huge numbers for a really long duration. Though they also say that the alloys of the ships show every sign of having been recast multiple times, and I don’t really know what to make of that.”

Rudi paused, then asked a question, starting to realize that they absolutely did not have enough information. “Have the analyses on the enemy weapons, genetics, or the more complete reports on their ships come in yet?”

Brimas signaled negative, her eyestalks flicking irritably. “No.”

“Then may I suggest that we table this until we have more information. I have reports streaming in from the front that I need to curate.”

****

The kids were still crying when the official re-enlistment requests came to their parents. It had been a hard decision, and while they’d originally thought to re-enlist after the Haven Raid, both of the Andalas had balked when they thought about the effects on their children. Unfortunately, the front at Aldian IV had been broken and the refugees had been forced to withdraw, with the Guard and the Fleet managing to hold off the Esharioc with substantial help from Keldebriar and human fleets, as well as Tyrsian ground forces.

With the ever-increasing streams of refugees coming in towards the core and ever more horrific reports coming in from the deep recon teams, they’d realized that the enemy had to be stopped cold. First though, the two veteran pilots needed to take their children somewhere safe. Tildas II was safe and about as far from the war zones as possible, on the opposite side of Terra from the front, in fact.

Alicia and Tony were clinging to their parents still, crying, begging them not to go. They’d been a little happier to know that they would be staying on Tildas II, but they still didn’t want their parents to leave.

As Jake and Callie let their engines recharge, they ate one last good meal with family before they resumed eating military rations on the Khan. The fish that the Nathians had caught was delicious, as were the berries.

Jake saw a small bush full of strange berries and suddenly felt a flash of remembrance. He beckoned Callie and the kids over, and Callie teared up as she recognized the berries as well. Popping a handful in her mouth and enjoying the strange, sweet and tart blend, she gave her kids a hug.

They should eat these. These were the first thing we ate when we landed here, right when we realized – or admitted our parents had died in space, far from home, and we were going to have to live without them. We’re not going to do the same to them. We aren’t.

Jake held out the berries to Alicia and Tony. “These are the berries we ate right before the Nathians adopted us. They’re safe for humans but poisonous to Nathians, so don’t give your friends any, okay?” He ruffled Tony’s hair, seeing again the scar tissue on his own hand from having flesh regrown after a close call with a radiation blast. “We’ll be back, okay?”

Alicia had been smart, though. She’d found out her parents were famous and looked up their biographies. “These were the berries you ate after our human grandparents died, though, aren’t they?”

Callie hugged her. “Yeah. Yeah they are. They were what we ate when we decided we couldn’t just sit and wait to die. But they’ll mean something else for us, okay?”

“Like what?”

“They’ll be a promise, okay? Just eat these, just like us. You’ll be okay. You’ll be fine with the Nathians, but we’ll visit every time we get R&R, okay? And when we get back, we’ll all eat them together, a reminder that we’re the family the galaxy can’t kill. You’ll understand why we left someday soon, but we’ll be back by then. Okay?”

Tony raised his eyes, and gripped his mother’s hand. “Okay.” Alicia nodded, silently.

The Andalas popped the berries into their mouths, hugged, and then waved goodbye as the children went over to the Nathian side of the family, and tried to hide the tears as their parents took off, heading back towards the Khan.

They hadn’t even left the gravity well of Tildas II when Jake started crying. “We have to make it back, Callie. We can’t leave them like our parents left us.”

“No. No we can’t. But we can’t let the Esharioc come for them, either. You saw the reports of what they did to the Epomi they caught. I’m not letting those things near our children, even if I have to slaughter them all myself.” A hint of her old bloodlust crept back to her voice, but it was backed with passion and hope and rage.

“Yeah. Yeah.” Jake wasn’t ready to quit either. “We’ll get the job done. We’ll take those fucked up beetles out. We’ll remind the galaxy that we are the best, but this is our last war, one way or another. But if we’re going to fight…”

They punched to warp.

“We’re going to make sure they get the message.”

They passed the rest of the journey swapping memories, guessing about how their kids would act around their old clanmates on Tildas, and thinking about how to explain to the rest of the squadron that no, Amelia would still be in charge but that they were back for the duration of the war.

However, upon pulling towards the sleek, scarlet and azure tiger striped carrier, all they could do as they hailed the ship and asked permission to dock in the hangar, was feel a sense of coming home, just a little. The hangar opened up again, and the two decorated pilots docked once more, gliding in gently to their past, and their future.


	13. Birth of Sanctum Guard

Namna was tending to the refugees in the newly-named fortress world of Bastion. It wasn’t perfect, by any stretch. Very well fortified, hardened against orbital bombing, with state-of-the-art orbital defense systems, but the living quarters were crowded. She was currently trying to help bathe a young human who was all but catatonic after seeing those eerie, semi-silent blasts blow apart his mother. He just kept crying, asking where she was. Namna hadn’t seen the blasts up close but people it with them tended to straight-up sublimate, so she could understand how a traumatized child would assume his parent had just vanished.

Kaisa wasn’t doing much better, desperately attempting to calm a panicked Epomi who was trying to flee from the bunker they were in, terrified of what was happening. The bulk of the enemy fleet had been repelled by orbital defenses and a patrol fleet, but bombing by a handful of upper-atmosphere craft was still ongoing. Oh, sure, the neutralization systems would kick in and neutralize that radiation in a few hours but for now they were all stuck down here.

A world shaking thud rattled dust from the titanium and ferrocrete ceiling, and the mollusks that the Galri had bred quickly fluttered about, secreting ooze that would mix with the dust to reinforce the structure. The children screamed as their parents instinctively covered them, and Namna hugged the one she was holding closer. Shen was still moving around, desperately delivering medication and healing stimulants and regenor solution to the wounds of those he could find, and occasionally realizing that some would need either a full bath in the regenor pools the Galri hospitals had. In some cases, there were those whose limbs had been lost to explosives, who would require prosthetics.

Then the bombing sirens died down. Namna felt a surge of relief, but that died, almost immediately, as further bolts engaged on all entrances and comms went dead, with the small indicator that enemy ground forces had landed, and that all refugees were encouraged to remain quiet and hidden.

The bunkers were soundproofed and ray-shielded, meaning that they wouldn’t turn up on any form of scanner, and talking wouldn’t cause trouble, but no transmissions could be made.

A few parents clutched their children closer as those sirens grew. Aid Corps had come to deliver supplies to Bastion and had only just finished unloading when the enemy had arrived. Looking around her, Namna felt exhausted. The galaxy had seen so much horror already, why did the Esharioc make it worse? Jake and Callie, who had more than earned the right to peace, had sent her a message indicating that their children were now on Tildas, and they were re-enlisting to help finish the war.

The phraseology that might have once chilled her now only relieved her. This needed to be finished. The galaxy needed to be finished with war. The sirens continued to blare, and Namna, now desperately attempting to calm them down, began singing. The words were Nathian, not Galick, but they carried a sense of reassurance, warmth, home. The song was a lullaby, many of the words were nonsense or antiquated, but the tune was perfect for lulling a frightened child to sleep.

Other parents realized what she was doing and began raising their own voices, a discordant but desperate mass of huddled life, hoping to avoid notice.

****

Audiofile:  [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnFSb8xcmN4 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnFSb8xcmN4)

Joan Bonhauer was tired of retreating. From Aldian IV, where Wolf Division and the Furies had repeatedly shattered flanking attempts until the refugees could be evacuated, and the Guard and elites had followed the refugees out, ceding Aldian to the enemy. Then at Valdis, where the Esharioc had figured out how to compromise the still-under-construction civilian bunkers with heavy bombing before they landed troops, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and creating millions who’d been herded towards the Guard’s defenses to throw the lines into disarray during the assault.

Millions of refugees were still unaccounted for, but based on the damage the Esharioc weaponry did, they were almost certainly vapor. The Guard had briefly prepared to stand on a fortified moon but it had been decided that automated defenses followed by a reactor detonation would be a better use for that moon, and that had done a considerable amount of damage to the enemy vanguard.

But she had been forced to retreat, yet again. And now, standing a trench line in the street, megawatt lasers ready to unleash searing coherent light while the rest of the guard fired straight into the throat of the enemy advance, the young corporal was ready to finally come to close with the enemy. There were a few soldiers, Tyrsian, Keldebriar, and human, in Guardian suits, but the majority of them were in the more standard Tactical, the enemy finally came into view.

Joan Bonhauer and her squad opened up. The Esharioc infantry were quickly scythed down by the megawatt lasers, while the handful moving to secure buildings or flank were mowed down by snipers. Dozens more were pinned down, allowing her to keep sending plasma bolts at the ones that were still in the open. A tank came around the corner, enemy tank.

Swearing, she pulled one of the grenades as the Esharioc’s weapons heated the palisade she was behind to a glowing crimson. Fingers fumbling, she attached the grav-drive primer that turned the standard hand grenade into a light anti-armor weapon, and then stuck an armored hand out to fire off the attack against the tank, with other Guard soldiers following suit, downing the tank. Unfortunately, one of those men had stuck his arm out a little too long before firing the weapon off and had caught one of the enemy blasts in the arm.

Normally that would have equated to just loosing the arm. When one is holding what is essentially a micronuclear hand grenade in stricken arm, the results tend to be rather more catastrophic.

That entire flank was suddenly open, the fortifications damaged and the men within them deceased, as the Esharioc advanced further up the road and the Guard began desperately firing, trying to retreat just a little further.

***

Dalafer watched Namna from a safe distance. The Aid Corps chief was a legend, one of the best diplomats and goodwill ambassadors in the galaxy, as was her human friend, Shen. He was all too aware, as the battle raged above, what was happening. Namna and Shen weren’t strangers to battle, though they’d never been frontliners. The bunkers were supposedly soundproofed but swore he could hear wounded soldiers screaming, the booms of artillery, the supersonic cracks of railgun rounds and the menacing hiss of plasma fire.

He opened his eyes again and thought he saw yellow-green Sclunter blood on the halls, on his paws again…Saw the gooey grey Vulpexi blood from that time in the factory, too, before the Dominion War.

“Hey, are you alright?” He only realized then that he had started to curl up. Namna was looking down at him.

“Don’t like bunkers.” He was still shaking and out of the corner of his eye he saw Shen approach.

“Hey, it’s okay. Look at me. What’s your name?”

“Dalafer, Bani clan. I was in the Third Hegemonic Guard, I enlisted after the Kyriion outbreak. I just…”

“Alright, it’s alright, stay with me. Help me out. I know it’s hard but there’s not enough Aid Corps here, can I get your help? I don’t need you to fight, just to help me with some of the kids. Namna’s got her paws full, and some of the species down here don’t really…trust humans. We’re just a bit too scary.”

Dalafer shuddered at the closeness of Shen’s comforting embrace. He couldn’t deny it either. Humans terrified him. Namna loved them, lover her adoptive siblings, but all he could think of when he saw humans was the Viper operative clapping him hard on the back and thanking him “for a good assist” the first time he’d killed to escape, that Wolf marine’s power-armored fist driving a Sclunter skull into the cave wall and that sickening crunch of bone…

But…he’d done some of that too. He stood up and pushed Shen away a little. “I can help. But…give me some space, please. Just tell me where to go, okay?”

Namna watched from a little ways away, as she kept distributing words of encouragement, assurances that the Guard would drive off the invaders, reminders that they’d be able to go back to the surface soon.

****

“No, damnit, I’m not retreating anymore!” She was still quiet. Anxiety had been a trait since she was pretty young, and while military training had made her more confident, it hadn’t quite managed to make her louder, yet.

The lieutenant snarled, sleep deprived, and muttered, “Corporal, get your fucking ass in the transport and try to pull away. We’re leaving.” He shoved her into the troop transport and started driving as they continued pulling back. The comms rattled. “Excellent. Pull back to tertiary defenses, don’t let them go any further than that.” The lieutenant shut the comms off after replying in the affirmative.

They were getting pretty close to the final position, and for some reason they weren’t starting to slow down. The LT started talking, just as Joan was thinking he was simply not seeing the next position? The man hadn’t slept in a few days… “Fuck, they’re going to push us back again.” He keyed the comms another time, this time signaling the troop transport. “Be ready to extract on short notice, they’re likely to break through –“

Joan had heard enough. Retreating by order was one thing, but they’d been ordered to hold Bastion at all costs because the refugee transports wouldn’t be able to get out. Troop transports had some stealth capacities to allow deep-strike but refugees were supposed to have battle fleets escorting them anyway. The LT was planning on leaving the refugees behind to save their own skin.

The Lieutenant turned around when he heard the safety of her Lancer pistol being flicked off, and found himself looking at a 12mm bore. “What the fuck are you doing, Corporal?!”

“WE HAVE RETREATED AGAIN AND AGAIN AND I AM NOT RUNNING ANOTHER FUCKING INCH! TURN THIS FUCKING TANK AROUND!”

The lieutenant reached for his own weapon and found the rest of the platoon standing with Joan, and complied. Joan snarled as the soldiers began throwing themselves into that set of defenses. “NOT ONE STEP BACKWARD, SOLDIERS!”

***

Zilnaya, Commander of the Esharioc Vanguard, strolled forward confidently. His super heavy tank had been destroyed, but not before he was able to evacuate it. He and his picked guard advanced. Many of them were normal Esharioc, but others were battle-hardened Crusaders, soldiers who had lived long enough to reach their full potential, who hulked far above the normal soldiers, and carried massive weaponry, rifles that fired 7mm rounds propelled by directional antimatter annihilations, giving each round the impact power of artillery. However, even they brought him less joy than savagely rending the plague soldiers in front of him, their blue and red and orange blood anointing his armor as his gravity hammer shattered bones.

Then a series of rapid strikes from the enemy snipers cut down six of his crusaders, and enemy megawatt lasers burned through two dozen more, which outraged him. He ordered those capable of taking cover to do so, while the Crusaders, hulking at nine sectares, would not be capable of doing any such thing, and were simply ordered to charge, firing their shoulder-mounted mortars and their rifles as they went.

**

Joan swore as the next wave came on. She thought the reports of 3.5 meter-tall Esharioc super soldiers had just been the result of drunken Wolf Marines talking shit to the Guard. But no, those were definitely real and they were coming to kill her. She fired repeatedly into the chest of the nearest one with her plasma rifle, finally slagging enough of the chest plate to sear into the body before the barrel of her weapon melted into burning slag. That was one issue with the plasma weaponry, rapid firing damaged it and rendered it inoperable.

She pulled her lancer pistol and fired off an entire magazine before she realized that no, actually that wasn’t going to have any effect on the bigger ones. On the normal Esharioc, sure, but the big ones’ armor was just too thick.

So she tossed her pistol to her left hand and unlimbered the vibrosword that was a Hegemony soldier’s weapon of last resort. The enemy charged forward, preparing to rip through the position, and Joan Bonhauer prepared to die. Her focus narrowed down to the single Esharioc super-soldier rushing at her with that enormous hammer, and she smiled, sadly but defiantly behind her visor.

***

Zilnaya cracked his peeling exoskeleton with amusement as he saw one of the plague-bearers – what were that breed called? Human, that was it – draw a pathetic close combat weapon to stand against a crusader.

A world-cracking boom of a drop pod hitting the ground ruined his amusement.

***

Namna had gotten the transmission that said the Guard’s main line had been broken, and that it was now down to street-to-street fighting that had hopes of wearing out the Esharioc through pure attrition, but she had little hope. She was going to die here. Her charges, all these people who had done nothing wrong, were going to die here, for nothing, because of the insane hatred of some species they’d never met.

She held the child who’d lost his mother, and a few others, singing gently as she prayed that any of these kids would get out alive. Hoping that failing that, she could make them feel safe until the moment the bunker collapsed.

Shen held out a calloused hand to her and grabbed her paw. He didn’t speak. He didn’t want to alarm the refugees. His eyes spoke for him.  _ Chief _ , they said,  _ It has been an honor. _

**

The Keldebriar officer Weylan e’Tas’s first target was the Esharioc super soldier bearing down on the lone human defender as he unlimbered his railgun. Six other warriors had the same target, in the outrage of such brutality towards someone showing such courage. Then he turned his weapons on the other Esharioc troops as the Keldebriar plunged into the battle.

**

Zilnaya realized that his forces were caught in an impossible position and ordered them to withdraw, the arrival of enemy reinforcements at, apparently, multiple different points on this planet and this city alone rendered his troops at a severe disadvantage with the feline plague troops on one side and the humans and reptilian ones in front of him. He began retreating with what soldiers he could salvage but rapidly found himself cut off and drew his own vibroblade, intending to die like an Esharioc should.

*

Joan had no time to waste, charging, alongside a handful of the Tyrsians and humans in her unit and attacked the now struggling knot of Esharioc, who were tied up in melee combat with the Keldebriar reinforcements, who wore the insignia of the Primarch Legion, the Keldebriar’s elite infantry formation.

The enemy super soldiers had been downed rapidly when the Keldebriar had arrived, but the remaining enemy fought ferociously, desperately fighting only to kill their enemies before they themselves were killed. Joan found herself face to face with the Esharioc officer and managed to evade his blows long enough to drive her blade through his armor and into his heart.

Then a backhanded blow struck her helmet and she was left to scramble to her feet as the rest of the unit attempted to brawl against the enemy while trying to avoid being stomped to death, and managed to gain her feet as the last Esharioc was crippled and executed, point-blank, by the Keldebriar.

She was panting a bit, but she had enough presence of mind to find that shocking. “Wait, I thought you had a code of honor for helpless opponents?”

“He hadn’t surrendered. Given that he was targeting civilians, only doing so would have actually obligated me to show him mercy.”

“Oh.” Joan paused, and held out a blood-slicked gauntlet, dyed that strange sickly clear-green of the Esharioc. The Keldebriar grasped it. “Thanks for the back-up, by the way.”

“My pleasure, corporal. Your unit saved a lot of lives. We have a battle to finish.”

Joan smiled viciously. “So we do. Let’s go, they’re still coming. The planet will break before I do.”

**

Namna had heard the Keldebriar Primarchs inbound transmission, but she hadn’t expected them to arrive so soon. A guard corporal who had, somehow, wound up in control of a platoon had informed her that the battle had turned and that the enemy field commander was now dead. Once the mop-up was over, the refugees would be able to come to the surface.

When that day came, Namna took in the fresh air of the above-ground with joy as the soldiers finished securing the last of the enemy weaponry. Dalafer had decided to help as well, enlisting in Aid Corps, this time as a co-ordinator. He might have had no business on the front anymore, but he was very capable of organizing mass movements of supplies and logistical aid for civilians in need.

Namna had heard, by now, that that Corporal may have attacked her commanding officer but as the man had died during the battle, and her new platoon adored her, it didn’t seem likely to go to court martial. Namna took down her name, and remembered that she’d have to put it into a petition for a force that was eventually going to be required. Each world had a basic garrison of Guard soldiers, Haven had an elite unit called the Spectrum Guard, and each member state homeworld had a larger garrison of their own elite forces, but fortress worlds, whose infrastructure was designed to house massive numbers of refugees safely against the onslaught, would need their own force.

And she already had at least one platoon she wanted to request for that unit…


	14. Back Together

Audio file  [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV2C9_MAJ0E ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV2C9_MAJ0E)

Vice Admiral Shiloh Hendrix (and her cat) stepped confidently aboard the Khan so that she could see some old friends again. Commander Amelia Minas was, as the Lieutenants Andala admitted, a better officer for Tiger Squadron than her predecessors, but it truly was a pleasure to see them back on this ship.

Both Jake and Callie saluted her sharply, as well as doing so for Amelia, and while the younger officer seemed flattered, Shiloh simply glared at them. “I didn’t bother with a rendezvous while waiting for orders so I could have you two stand still, you little twats. This isn’t how you greet old friends.” She walked across the deck and shoved her cat into Jake’s arms, where it mewled while he held it, and embraced Callie. “Good to have you back, girl.”

Callie took the cat as Jake was grabbed by Shiloh. “I’d say it’s good to be back, Vice Admiral – congratulations on the promotion, by the way – but we had to leave our kids behind.”

Shiloh’s face fell. “I know. I was sorry to hear that. You two deserved some peace with them. How are Alicia and Tony, by the way?”

“Pretty good. Curious, energetic. Kids, ya know?”

“I do. I actually have a few nieces and nephews I visit frequently. All the same, it is good to see you two again. Stay alive, finish the war quickly, and we’ll all get to go home sooner. Stay careful though.”

Callie started chuckling. “Yeah, got it, “mom.”

“I kept you both from getting spaced when you were infected. As far as your life in the military goes I might as well be your mother.” That got Amelia laughing as Jake and Callie chuckled, embarrassed. “Go meet some of your new squadron mates.”

Shiloh turned on her heel and took the shuttle back to the Nemean. Amelia showed Jake and Callie around.

“So, sir, ma’am, the Wall hasn’t been updated much. Lost a dozen good pilots in the Marauder war when Kragvaz’s fleet got lucky in the Horse Nebula, but for the most part until these Esharioc assholes showed up we’ve actually been doing pretty good. Oh, humans aren’t the only species in the squadron any more. There’s a few humans serving in Star Apex, and a few Keldebriar serving here, but uh…”

She opened the door and an Ivari like nothing the Andalas had ever seen. Her feathers were clipped strangely, unevenly, dyed crimson and navy in alternation and looked somehow like a beautiful alien punk statement.

“Hey, Ywyn, this is Jake and Callie Andala. The founders of Tiger Squadron. Sir, Ma’am, this is Ywyn, one of the best pilots in the squadron.”

Callie held out a hand and gripped Ywyn’s talon, as did Jake, feeling the cool brush of feathers and strength of her grip. “Hey. Good to have you.” Ywyn’s feathers rippled in an Ivari expression of pleasure.

After Ywyn walked past them, Jake turned to Amelia and said, “Oh, Ma’am, you actually outrank us, not the other way around, so just use our ranks or names, not the honorifics.” Amelia blinked, blushing slightly. She still remembered them as her commanding officers, her heroes from childhood, but…yes, now they were under her command, weren’t they? They’d been back for less than a standard day, but in that time they’d consistently deferred to her, as though trying to communicate to the rest of the squadron that whether or not the founders were back, it was still Amelia in command.

Callie followed up Jake’s comment, and Amelia almost fainted. “Oh, and by the way? You’re doing well. By all accounts you’re an incredible leader for this unit, and you should be proud of yourself. We’re proud to have been your officers at some point, and we’re proud to have you as our CO now.”

Amelia stammered, then whispered, “Thank you. That means a lot.” Getting back to the mess, the trio, along with Ywyn, sat down and began eating. The Squadron had changed while they were one. Many familiar faces were scattered throughout the mess, a few of them raising to note the return of the founders of the squadron. Most weren’t looking up until Amelia spoke. “Hey, Spacers, the old LTs are back to finish one more war with the Hegemony’s best squadron! Let’s swear them back in!”

Jake and Callie held up their hands. “I, Jake – “ “I, Callie Andala, -“

“Do hereby solemnly swear to uphold and defend the constitution of the United Hegemony of Free Species, and to fight to the limit of my skill, ability and courage to further the rights of all sapient life, to obey the orders of those set above me and lead well those positioned below me, to help create a better galaxy, from the depths of my home world’s deepest crevices to the edge of the stars, for as long as I shall live.”

The oath concluded, and Amelia saluted. Jake and Callie kept the salute up until Amelia dropped it, thus signaling to the Squadron in no uncertain terms that Amelia was still in command here. Amelia smirked, “As a side note, maybe you can help boost us past Star Apex in kill counts. The contest keeps going back and forth on the new targets.”

A laugh greeted that statement. There was the Memorial wall, but kill counts were also tracked by the two squadrons for shooting down enemy fighters as well for each capital ship. The two squadrons knew not to let it compromise discipline or teamwork but as it turned out, the personalities that made for the best starfighter pilots tended to be competitive. Ywyn, despite her initial exasperation with the concept, had to admit: it actually made the battles enjoyable, a little less nightmarish, to consider them a competition between Apex and Tiger Squadrons to see who could stop the hegemony’s enemies more effectively instead of a lethal battle. Maybe that was the other trick the warrior species had figured out, she reflected.

Jake and Callie checked up on old friends, ate, laughed, and took in more details about the Marauder War and the fighting against the Esharioc so far. The two veteran pilots retired to the crew barracks on the ship, but first took a stop to pay their respects at the Wall for the friends they’d lost.

The same cool steel bulkhead still stood, the names of the fallen still emblazoned on it. They weren’t ready for the names they saw about a third of the way through it. Tony and Alicia. The friends they’d made, the one’s who’d died in the final convulsions of the Dominion war, the ones they’d named their children for. They wound up sprinting away from the Wall, breathing heavily and hiding in a tiny vent, crying, trying to erase the images that had come to their minds, of their children dying under enemy guns, of themselves being blown away and leaving their children behind…

“We have to win. We have to survive to go back we can’t…”

“I know. I know. This might have been a mistake but we can do this. We have to. We’ll manage.”

“I…we’ve…we’ve done so much but we can get through this. Come on, let’s just…let’s go. Can’t let them see us like this. Maybe we need Kaisa aboard again, or someone.”

“I think we’ll need that at some point. Let’s see if our first engagement goes well, first.”

**

A few weeks later the Squadron got orders again. The Andalas got their old jumpsuits back on, and climbed into the cockpits of their Rakshasas. More nervous than they’d ever been in the cockpit before, but somehow feeling that eager edge to fly and fight again.

The assault on Bastion had been sharply and effectively repelled by the Guard and the Primarch Legion, as well as a brutal space battle, but in the months since the war had ground to a bloody standstill. Wolf Division, Furies, and Primarch Legion were sprinting from planet to planet to repel large-scale assaults, but the space war had more or less been reduced to skirmishes, bombing raids, and a few large-scale clashes.

Currently, Tiger Squadron had been ordered to intercept a unit of troop carrier ships and their escorting warships before they could land troops on the Dembra mega-forge world on Carsai, the one whose assault had been the spark that ignited the Marauder war. Carsai was one of the better refineries of neutronium, durasteel, tungsten and titanium, as well as being one of the major places in which they built many of the Hegemony’s strongest dreadnaughts and battleships.

As the squadron deployed from the Khan, Jake and Callie received a hailing from Amelia, who said quietly, “Hey, you two. The squadron and I talked, and they get that you’re not in command anymore, but they really want to hear you guys give the old battle cry again.”

Callie shrugged. “Sure.”

As the squadron ignited its boosters and streaked towards the Esharioc forces, Jake took a deep breath and shouted into the comms. “TIGER SQUADRON, FANGS OUT!”

The Rakshasas plunged headlong into the fight, Callie banking right and firing slightly at some of the troop carrier ships, knowing it was mostly going to simply draw fire from the fighters, which Ywyn quickly engaged. Callie had learned Ywyn’s callsign, and had been mildly amused by it, given her initial reaction to the Ivari’s aesthetic.

“Good shooting, Punkhawk. I’m going to take your nine.” She fell to the left of Ywyn and twisted the nose of her fighter downward and fired at the Esharioc fighter attempting to come up at their bellies and cut sideways as the fragments continued flying past her, before barrel-rolling out of the path of a massive warhead before Jake scythed around her right wing and pounded an enemy corvette’s guns with his mass drivers before twisting his Rakshasa’s nose upward and then plunging back down as he fired his primary warhead into the spine of the target and leveled out, flying away from the resulting fireball.

Callie and Ywyn and streaked past the fireball under the cover of the blast shadow to tear part three more Esharioc fighters between them and draw off, along with a wing of some twenty other Tigers, to engage the Esharioc fighters, shooting several off the back of Amelia’s craft as she fired her warhead into a troop carrier, melting the enemy ground forces under the antimatter annihilation. A few corvettes set up a net of fire that effectively hemmed in the Squadron from most of the vectors they could take to get an advantageous angle.

Amelia did a few quick calculations as Ywyn swooped and evaded, despite the lack of experience as a warrior, the fact that Ywyn was of a race that had been flying and piloting since childhood gave her a natural advantage for three dimensional thinking. Amelia spotted one option as the enemy corvettes continued to maneuver to keep the squadron under their guns. “Ywyn, cripple the left one’s right engine. Everyone else, keep eyes off her.”

“10-4, commander.” The spacer dropped two lances into the engine she’d been ordered to target and, unable to compensate in time, the target ship’s vector changed and brought it into a sharp collision with the other corvette, cracking them apart as Jake and Callie accelerated towards a destroyer, with Jake crippling the guns before Callie damaged the ship. Ywyn’s torpedo finished the destroyer, and the squadron reeled to engage the surviving fighters, occasionally splitting off in twos and threes to devastate the troop transports, which still desperately attempted to split off from the engagement in an attempt to reach their objective.

Before the battle could really finish, the last two troop transports split away and punched into hyperspace, withdrawing from the embattled system while the last of their fighter escort fought or withdrew.

“Sound off.” The squadron did so. Eighteen Tigers had been killed, and had destroyed forty-three Esharioc ships, three corvettes and a destroyer, as well as four troop transports. Overall, the skirmish had gone well. Jake and Callie were flushed in the cockpit, still flushed and exhilarated from their first real dogfight back with the squadron in some time.

There were still names to be carved into the Wall, but for today, their first day back, the Tigers had won.


	15. A Break in the Storm

The Imperator of Purity was sitting astride the throne on the world the Esharioc had chosen to build as their new capitol. They’d named it Zenitan, in homage to their own god of healing, the one who’d shielded the survivors from the Abomination. As the daemon’s work was clear here, no doubt this world and its people had been offered as sacrifices by the powers of this galaxy to their mad god, it had only seemed right to sanctify it with Zenitan’s name, and to build a monument of him, pleading with Him to adopt the souls of those slain by the mad heretics as sacrifices upon this world. The Emperor drummed his talons upon the throne, the bright eyes burning intensely from beneath that great, forward-sloping skull, his jaws grinding against each other as the report was delivered.

“Knight Lord Zilnaya fell in a failed attack on the plague heretic world of Bastion. Zilnaya’s lieutenants were forced to withdraw. Your Sanctity, perhaps – “

An upheld hand stopped the courier. “That world contains tens of billions of units’ worth of housing and the requisite generators and solar farms to make use of them. We have secured adequate worlds for food production, but Bastion would be useful. The Carsai foundries should be considered only a secondary target until Bastion falls.”

Bastion, as the Esharioc’s intelligence leaders had discovered, also contained a critical feature. Interdiction generators, which would effectively prevent a jump to FTL without the correct permissions, which meant that one couldn’t simply cripple the orbital defenses of that system and continue through into the rest of Hegemony space.

Oh, absolutely, there were other routes to the core, but many of them passed through large nebulae that mauled hyperspace navigation. They’d seized upon Zenitan, but in retrospect it might have been better to take another route. The arms of this spiraling mess of a galaxy tended to contain gravatic field distortions between them, meaning that the only way through to the core was to fight up this arm, and to do that, they either had to deal with boring through a nebula, which would put them at serious risk of flying into the mass shadow of a star or similar disaster, or they had to take Bastion.

Or…

No, the Imperator thought to itself. That would be a solution, but the risks to that particular platform were great, and it did not wish to reveal the Esharioc’s ultimate weapon as yet. “Take the remnants of Zilnaya’s forces, as well as ten thousand more Crusaders. Eradicate the heretics upon Bastion. Do not withdraw. Our people’s survival relies on the cleansing of this galaxy. Wipe them out, starve their mad god, star by star.”

“Understood, your sanctity.”

***

It had been quickly realized that Bastion would better serve as a fortress world to attempt to stymie the enemy onslaught. Lt. Joan Bonhauer’s platoon would be among the last out, as refugees were evacuating daily to a system further in the core, and there were millions more hegemonic guard troops arriving on the planet daily. Fortifications, surface-to-orbit anti-ship guns, atmospheric shielding against orbital bombardment, bunker lines, blast-resistant walls, artillery, all being rapidly constructed to attempt to halt the coming invasion.

***

Kaisa was talking to a human girl, a daughter of Jaegar, in fact, the man who’d rescued xer, about an exciting possibility for a cybernetic system that would work better than their current ones. Galri medicine was spectacular, but it couldn’t regrow limbs, so prosthetics were still useful. Jessie Jaegar had called in Kaisa as well as a Palnt named Breckna, to initiate work on the project. There were hundreds of wounded soldiers streaming in from the front, and while some certainly wanted to go home, there were a surprising number who were absolutely furious about the horrors they’d seen, and wanted to get back out and fight the Esharioc. And…a Dembra had suggested something pretty brilliant, among those who wanted their new limbs to be able to interface…

***

The feline plague heretics were still harassing worlds they’d already secured, repeatedly destroying ammunition, food, and fuel stores simply to spite them, alongside hit-and-run attacks against the soldiers stopping there to rebuild.

Even more concerning were the primate ones, the “humans” who referred to their particular unit as “Viper Teams.” Among these, none were more dreaded than that led by the female human with the dark hide whose attacks consistently sewed devastation among their troops. The “Keldebriar” were fierce and devastating in their attacks on shipyards and training facilities of their warriors, striking and fleeing, though the humans were frequently even worse, taking a small but critical position and holding it only long enough to set destructive charges – frequently stolen from the People, at that – and then abscond, detonating the charges the minute the area was re-secured by the Esharioc.

***

General Graador’s forces were preparing to land on Bastion, but their transports trailed behind Admiral Tusaroth’s, whose ships were in charge of blasting through the Hegemonic armada and the orbital defenses. Bastion had to fall for the People to survive. There could be no mistakes. There were other fleets darting around past Bastion, those who had braved the nebulae, solely present to devastate the hegemony here and there to keep them from fully focusing on the defense of Bastion, a ploy by Tusaroth. As the Hegemony didn’t know how many raid fleets there were, they’d never know when all had been destroyed, meaning that they’d have to keep up fleet patrols and Guard garrisons.

The Advance of Survival would not be halted. Descending upon Bastion would come hundreds of thousands of ships, billions of soldiers, and tens of thousands of those would be Crusaders, the veterans of centuries of conflict whose epigenics had finally activated after surviving so long, and with those ground forces would be millions of armored vehicles. The galaxy would finally be cleansed, and the plague, contained.


	16. Enemy at the Gates

Audio file  [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASj81daun5Q ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASj81daun5Q)

Rudi Ceris was watching the news as the Esharioc descended on Bastion. Three whole armadas had been tasked with interfering with the attack. It was assumed that they would eventually be driven out, but the goal was to try to break apart the enemy fleet and attempt to neutralize as many troop transports and orbital bombardment platforms as possible to limit the attacks on the ground forces.

His brother Marcus, in Wolf Division, was heading there.

And his part…he turned off the news and turned back towards the table where Galina was conducting the meeting. “We’ve managed to determine a little more. It seems a logical conjecture that their galaxy is where the Ivari lost ship went. We’ve recovered records, dozens of them, to an “Abomination” that they believe we worship. The same “Dark God” apparently killed the majority of their civilization, and victims attest to hearing it speak to them as they sickened and died of a plague.”

Rudi cursed. “What the hell? That doesn’t…I mean, a plague that wipes out entire civilizations sounds familiar, like Kyriion, but I don’t know why they’d think it talks…” He paused, then pulled up a few more records… “Wait. Some survivors of Kyriion report auditory hallucinations. Did the Esharioc hear it speaking to them?”

Galina shrugged. “Possible. But if that’s the case, and they think we’re giving it strength…. If you found something that worshiped Kyriion and saw it as a duty to spread it…well, you saw what we did to the Synthor. They think they’re defending themselves against some sort of eldritch terror. And they’ll do anything it takes. Because really…wouldn’t you? Didn’t we, against those damn droids?” Galina stood up as her communicator hummed and she answered the phone. “Ambassador has volunteered to speak to the enemy leadership. Myself and a few Tenebrae agents are supposed to go as well. I’ll be able to report on their motives shortly. Good luck.”

***

Brimas had been gone from the meeting regarding the intelligence analysis. She’d discovered the location, with extensive help from the astrographer, of the Esharioc’s base, and it was now her turn to live up to the promise that the Vulpexi would stand alongside the rest of the Hegemony in withstanding the threat. Oh, the automated systems of orbital defense were able to operate autonomously, but they were more effective with a sapient being operating the software to optimize the effect.

And no one could do it quite as well as Brimas. She took a breath, hide rippling as the guns came online and activated, all over the Bastion system.

***

Tusaroth was watching the array of enemy fleets spiraling in preparation for the counterstroke. The feline plague heretics plunged down on his upper wing, has had been anticipated, though they also scythed into the belly of his fleet, attacking the lower wing, suddenly. The ambush had been anticipated, and his own destroyers fired away, setting up a net of actinic fire as his outermost elements crumbled beneath the Keldebriar’s guns.

Fully a third of the Keldebriar assault craft shattered under the fire, the remaining two thirds swept out and sideways, attempting to gain flanking angles to further damage his fleet for the human fleet’s more sustained assault. Tusaroth’s jaws split in a malevolent grin. “Another angle won’t work much better. Same attack pattern as expected….” An indicator of one of his closer ships taking heavy damage from a previously unseen defensive emplacement. Specifically, some type of missile pods mounted to a few of the asteroids.

***

Brimas chuckled as her missiles cracked open one of the enemy’s cruisers. The rest streaked towards their targets, but now that the enemy point defense was focused on the first missile pod, the shots would be stopped. But it gave the fighters an opportunity.

***

“Papa Khan, take out that cruiser. Punkhawk, Mama Tiger, keep those fighters off him. Delta wing, take apart that fighter squadron in the upper wing, Bravo, try to cut up those corvettes and give the Keldebrair an opening.”

“10-4, Queen.”

“Tiger Squadron, this is Talon Apex, coming in at your high four.”

The Talons blasted in, and the scores of normal squadrons were soon to follow, Jake and Callie’s almost eerie silence on the comms aside from their acknowledgements of targets and cover making it all too clear that the fighting had lost the adrenal joy it had once possessed.

Jake plunged under the cruiser he’d been told to target, keeping himself tight to it until he spotted the torpedo bay, his own maneuvering permitted by the traded neutralization of his shields to be allowed inside theirs, a trick the Palnt had worked out to give the Raksashas and the Apex Talons an edge, though they hadn’t been able to get it to work on standard systems. The lasers and the wave-surges cut around him but he managed to finally fire one of his own torpedoes into the enemy’s missile bay, opening the reactor to a second torp.

“One down…”

Callie was sweeping around and blasting away enemy fighters in droves, barrel-rolling away from the enemy fire and peppering the enemy fighters until they broke apart. Ywyn and Amelia were spiraling through the void and engaging, along with the ferocious hit and run plunging strikes by Talon Apex.

Two full Star Guard armadas began the rush, corvettes and destroyers plunging in from all sides while the battleships and dreadnaughts plunged in headlong, firing the entire way. The Esharioc fleet met them, cutting through the defense though taking heavy losses until Lion Fleet encountered them with Imperial Shield sweeping in from behind.

***

The battle seemed to be going well, mostly out of range for her weaponry, and the first two turrets she controlled had been destroyed. Brimas was still in the orbital control center, watching the battle unfold on the viewscreen, noting that with the initial clash of armadas over and more Esharioc ships entering the system along with more Hegemonic vessels, the specialty units, the Keldebriar’s elite naval units as well as both Tiger Squadron and Lion Fleet withdrew in accordance with their orders for the rest of their service in the war – intercepting those Esharioc ships that would, inevitably, attempt to circumvent the Bastion system.

Brimas watched ever more ships spiral in, watching the strange silent dance of ships, missiles, kinetics, energy weapons, the silent explosions wracking ships and the flashes of light that indicated energy weapons or antimatter-propellant fire. The battle had a disturbing beauty, this far from the devastation, where she couldn’t see the broken or burned bodies floating after the destruction of ships. Up close, Brimas knew, it was different. She had run the guns at Vulpex Prime when the human bombers had come in, during the Dominion war.

Her eyestalks flicked with dismissal of that horrifying thought. While the armed enemy ships were occupied with the armadas, a different group of ships had entered the system at a slightly different vector. Based on their massive size, heavy shields, armor, and light weaponry, they were troop transports.

Her outer skin pulsed with irritation. These monsters were far worse than the Dominion had ever been. Worse, if left unchecked, than humanity had been to the Vulpexi during the war. “Well then. I guess my part’s still on.”

The guns flashed, desperately attempting to break the assault apart before it could enter orbit and begin dropping troops on Bastion. She swiveled the hammock-style chair back and forth between all the controls, firing from each weapon system in turn and flipping them back to manual as she switched, blasting open the bellies of the transports and spilling out their heavily armed and lethal cargo to die in space.

“Come on, monsters.” Third gun clocked out. Three troop transports out of dozens gone. Brimas realized, rapidly, that she would never be able to guess how long the battle dragged on as her guns ran dry, one by one, as dozens of troop transports were destroyed, eliminating the soldiers they might have landed on Bastion. Then she heard the crash of an enemy drop pod impacting her own command center. She only had so long before they got through the automated defenses and had her, so Brimas turned her attention back to stalling the enemy invasion, firing off the last loads of her last weapons, before picking up the ansible and speaking into it.

“Endirmas. I’m going to die. They’re on board the defense center. I had a hunch it’d come to this. I’m…I wanted to see our species make amends for what it had done, but I think I helped. Slowed them down. Maybe made a difference, I don’t know. I just…Endirmas I don’t want to die. This wasn’t how it was supposed to….oh god they’re in…take care of –“ [transmission: terminated]

***

Tusaroth watched as his assault was slowly pushed back. It wasn’t terribly shocking. The goal had never been to actually drive the enemy fleets from a defensively advantageous system. Merely to engage the Hegemony’s defenders in space to allow the ground troops – literal billions of them, to land on the fortress world. His core duty wouldn’t come until later.

“All Eshiarioc fleets. Withdraw, our task for now has been completed. Remnants of the wing forces, escape to the gaps between the spiral arms and attempt to find other ways Coreward. Central line element, withdraw and prepare to regroup with the rest of the fleet.”


	17. Still Serving

Audio File:  [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jTgkTEDDog ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jTgkTEDDog)

Among those who’d been wounded in the early battles of the war, a few thousand had opted out of having limbs grown back at the expense of the Hegemony and sent home, in favor of getting some upgrades, designed by a mix of Palnt, Dembra, and human scientists, one of whom was the daughter of the legendary General Jaegar.

To these soldiers, Tyrsian, human, and Keldebriar, new limbs had been grafted, mechanical and heavy, made to function perfectly well as limbs in their own right and be comfortable, but better yet, to flawlessly interface with the new and improved versions of the old Ursa Shock Mechs. These few thousand souls, Wolf Division, the Tyrsian Furies and Devastators, and the Keldebriar Primarch legion stood ready, along with the half-billion soldiers of the Hegemonic Guard. The last civilian transports were still leaving as the Esharioc troops descended, and almost immediately stepped out and began firing, sending the wave-surge shots into the fortifications.

The old man, left to his native Ukraine until the new war had started, finally stood. His age had been a barrier, but he’d lost more than a few limbs to amputation from his assorted mishaps with the boredom of retirement, finally stood, his massive mech activating, the guns beginning to spool up, the rail gun ready. He turned back to the rest of the unit. Old soldiers like him, most who didn’t want any life but that of a warrior. Unhealthy. 

He glanced back, looking towards the position those brave bastards in Sanctum Guard had set up. That young woman who’d forced the stand on this same world earlier was there. Vasiliev had given her advice about how to fight and stay alive, what to cling to keep yourself from going insane. “It’s just a matter of holding in your mind the people you’re protecting, more than the death, more than the killing, more than the enemy. Just hold in your mind the people and places you care about, and let that memory sooth you when the fear or guilt gets too much.”

Looking at it now, he reflected idly that that might have been rather shitty advice. He certainly wasn’t, mentally, the healthiest. Seventy-eight year old alcoholic who had come back to the service after over twenty Terran years just to have one last dance. 

But as he watched the advance of the Esharioc into the kill chute, he smiled as he clacked the detonators for the mines and heard the thunder of the artillery. There were, after all, much more unhealthy things. Like attacking humanity or it’s friends.

“Alright, men. The enemy is at the gates, but we will stand! Push the fuckers back.” Alexi Vasliev’s smile and terrifying roar gave no doubt how he’d become known as the Bear of North Terra. The Esharioc infantry fired at the machine-bound warriors, their heavy weapons downing but a handful out of the hundreds before the Ursa Shock Regiments began firing their heavy weapons, the same kinetic fire modules as used on the Rakshasas: 6mm wide, centimeter-long depleted uranium teardrops accelerated to .15c by directionally-controlled antimatter explosions in place of gunpowder. These relatively tiny teardrops tore through all but the heaviest of armored vehicles and ripped through the Esharioc advance. The Ursas continued their rush as the Guard began firing their artillery and sending forward the armored vehicles assigned to this sector, including the super-heavy tanks once known as the Rhinos began deploying to flank the enemy ground forces.

***

Lt. Joan Bonhauer watched the armored forces, both the mechs and the armored vehicles, begin their flanking maneuver to the counter-attack on the hated invaders. The sonic booms of relativistic fire were ear-shredding without the noise dampeners built into the helmets and even with the helmets were painfully loud. The tanks swung wide and began an assault on the Esharioc armored corps to the west while the Rhinos and the Ursas plunged into the enemy center line, firing their heavy weaponry with the support of the devastating artillery to begin breaking apart the onslaught and driving the enemy back a few feet at a time. The artillery pounded away from above, preventing the enemy from being able to effectively outflank the massive armored vehicles bearing down on them, firing all the while.

***

Vasiliev laughed madly. Even as he fired his megawatt lasers and the massive kinetic weapon, he closed with the enemy and activated the mech’s not inconsiderable melee weaponry, bringing it to bear on the elite enemy troops, the giant crusaders, the ones with the heavy railguns and the gravity hammers. One of his kinetic weapons’ barrels was shattered by a railgun, and his armor and shielding took some damage when the projectiles hit closer to where he was ensconced within the armor. Swinging the massive chainblade heavily and decapitating two of the crusaders before firing the megawatt laser off with the mech’s other hand, he managed to inflict heavier losses, cutting the treads off one of the Esharioc super heavy tanks and scything through their ranks while attempting to evade the heavy handed blows of the gravity hammers until he felt the armor around the cockpit begin to crack a little.

Fortunately for him, the recordings of the enemy speech had finally allowed enough of the Esharioc language to be translated that it could be added to the lexicon of languages the translator could render in Galick. Which was how he could know that they were laughing at the withered old Ukrainian with the one organic limb left to his name.

Broken, they called him. Old. “How desperate must the heretics be, how pathetic that they rely on shattered half-corpses in machines to do their fighting for them? This purification will be easier than the Imperator thought!” Vasiliev laughed as his chainblade cut that Crusader shoulder to hip and threw the pieces at the other troops, still firing his remaining gravity gun and megawatt laser around at the enemy, watching his fellow old soldiers break through the enemy lines, but as always in combat the old man’s vision narrowed solely to the foe in front of him. 

“Broken, old, half dead, yes. But never out of the fight. And even in death I’ll serve my people better than you served yours living!” Alexi seized the gravity hammer as it was brought down on his megawatt laser, wresting it out of the hand of the alien supersoldier and slashing the chainblade across the invader’s face, bisecting its skull before gaining adequate space to continue fighting.

The Ukrainian fired a few shots of the anti-armor grenade launcher at the tank he’d just crippled, targeting the gun emplacements to allow a few of the Guard’s tanks to approach and bring their own heavy guns to bear on the mobile fortress, armor-piercing rounds and antimatter explosives tearing open the armor and ripping into the machinery beneath.

Then the Esharioc brought their own artillery to bear on the defenders. Vasiliev saw the destruction of a single Rhino tank, the massive machine blowing apart, sending giant, red-hot shrapnel in every direction, wounded and killing his own men, other Guard tanks and dozens of Esharioc troopers. The assault continued and Vasiliev kept a careful eye on his own power counter. His indicators for the system he piloted noted that his megawatt laser had become overheated, the barrel partially slagged by enemy fire, so he closed with another massive tank and shoved that weapon into the gears of its treads, jettisoning it and withdrawing as the churn of the gears destroyed the microfusion cells, which in turn partially melted the gears themselves.

His kinetic weapon had mostly been able to function on the two remaining functional barrels but it had finally clocked out of rounds. Firing the grenade launchers on both wrists at as many of the Esharioc’s lighter tanks as he could, damaging or destroying them, though one finally managed to get a shot off that tore one arm off his mech entirely. “Fucking shit. I shouldn’t have left Ukraine a second time. Heh.”

Still fighting, the major noted that many of the Ursas had been downed in the ferocious fighting, the Esharioc having figured out that the joints of the mechs were the ideal targets, and more and more of the old soldiers were falling to the hated invaders. Vasiliev fired off the last of the grenades into clumps of Esharioc attempting to avoid the Guard’s artillery, only to catch a heavy shell in the lower half of his own mech, tearing off the legs and leaving him flailing wildly against the enemy with the chainblade before a squad of heavy crusaders gathered around him to bring the hammers down on the mech, and it was at that moment that Vasiliev realized that perhaps, just perhaps, he hadn’t wanted to die on the battlefield after all.

Knowing full well that it was a little too late to take it back now, and his mech’s limbs were shattered, he took one final swig of vodka and resolved to go out against a genocidal invader as his ancestors had. As his old comrade, the original Captain Shen had. He reached out and hauled down on the suicide switch, his last thoughts of the battered farm in the motherland.

***

The Esharioc advance had been checked for a moment by the ferocious attack of the Ursa Shock Regiment’s heroic old soldiers, and the beleaguered Guard unit saved by the destruction of the Esharioc’s armored vehicle columns, but looking at the troop carriers still sweeping down on the planet to land more troops, it was apparent to the Sanctum Guard, that elite unit still safeguarding the last refugees’ escape, that such a counterstroke, despite leaving better than three quarters of a million enemy dead on the field, had no true chance of stopping the onslaught. Merely breaking the worst of it.

The artillery continued to carve large holes in the enemy units advancing, but now Joan was forced to huddle in a bunker of her own as Sanctum Guard’s megawatt lasers opened up and began scything through the aliens’ ranks. The laser she operated was among them, and Joan felt, for the first time in her life, perfectly secure, even on a battlefield, despite all the horror, in the nigh-unstoppable guardian armor worn by the elite of Guard units.

The Bears had been nigh unstoppable too, of course, but they had fought outside the fortifications, and had done their duty bravely, badly mauling the enemy’s elite forces. Sighting the laser, she watched the brutal violet beam of coherent light begin flicking rapidly across the enemy advance.

“Enemy at the gates, yet we will stand,” that was what Vasiliev had said. His own ancestors war cry as they were assaulted where they’d made their stand. But as the Esharioc’s advance pushed forward, Joan had her own to cry out in the face of the invaders as she and her squad plied their weapons from the bunker.

“On ne passé pas!” the words shouted at Verdun against a different enemy, over six hundred hears prior, rang out now, as Sanctum guard stood to fire against the Esharioc.

The boom of enemy artillery rattled the heavy bunker they were firing from, but it remained standing, prompting one soldier, American ancestry but like Joan, born light years from earth to laugh nervously.

The trenches blazed to light around the bunker as those soldiers opened fire as well.

***

Dalafer hated the guns. Artillery was always the worst. No way to tell if you were alright or not. In the night you couldn’t see anything but the flash, and they said that if you heard the boom you were safe, but he could never be sure. His job for now was to load the civilians into the last few refugee ships before the lines got any closer, or worse, before the enemy fleets closed off the exit. A boom, far closer, accompanied by screams, came pretty close, along with the flash of silver-white fire that indicated a micronuclear round. The radiation from that variant was mild, but staying long-term in an area where those were coming down still had serious health risks. “Aboard the ships, guys, move, move!”

Dalafer remembered the deaths of his clan, remembered the deaths inflicted by the Vulpexi, the Sclunter, the Synthor, and yet he was still alive. He wouldn’t let it happen again. Fear made his limbs leaden as he shoved more of the civilians aboard the last of the ships, slowly moving towards it when a single Esharioc soldier, one of the normal ones, not the giants, appeared, it’s shock-sword present, its “purging lance” as the enemy’s horrifying energy weapons were properly known, was absent, and the creature was clearly wounded, yet it staggered towards the unarmed civilians that Dalafer was attempting to evacuate with purpose. Namna was still loading the evacuees onto the ship and Shen raced towards the wounded alien soldier to subdue him. Before the monster could bring his weapon to bear, Shen had tackled his arms. The Esharioc soldier tried to wrestle free, but Shen held him fast. Dalafer felt a trace of the old rage rising inside him. Monsters had come yet again to kill the innocent and as terrified as he was, Dalafer wasn’t about to let Shen take this one out on his own. He raced forward, grabbing a fallen vibroblade and snapped to Shen. “Roll him over, we need to get out of here.” Shen understood, grappling the thrashing Esharioc onto his back, keeping its arms pinned. Dalafer dropped to his knees and forced the vibroblade into its heart, helped Shen to his feet, and began moving, pushing the civilians onto the ship, picking up one more, badly hurt, and vaulting onto the transport as it took off, Shen and Namna helping them both aboard.

Killing wasn’t something Dalafer ever wanted to do again. But protecting refugees and transporting them, taking care of them in evacuee camps, that was something he could do, and do well, terrified though he could be. And as the last civilian ship out soared into the spiraling night of space, Dalafer knew he’d found a home again.


	18. Answers

_ For those of you reading this, many still doubt that these were truly the words of the Esharioc Imperator. They were, as plainly as written here. Nothing frightened me more than our meeting with it. The way it spoke left little doubt that it truly believed its people had no choice. We were marked for annihilation by the enemy for a crime we never meant to commit, doomed to fight it out to a finish by their indoctrination and fear. Had it not been for the Bonding Heresy, the war would have been so much worse. And yet, when we spoke our story, I saw that monster express what I believe was genuine remorse for the idea of destroying us all, exceeded only by its determination to see it through. – Endirmas Blorgi _

***

The ambassadors of the Hegemony descended on the stealth ship piloted by the Ivari smuggler, Ritia. They were moving to the formally dead world where the Esharioc had made their base. With them was Galina Kuznetsov, on orders to spy and gather any useful intelligence she could. Her team had been left on Haven, to determine any further useful intelligence they had about the Esharioc, with orders to focus on the enemy’s movements. With any luck, she’d determine their motives today.

***

The Imperator of the Esharioc sat upon the Sanctified Throne. It read over the reports. While the stealth ship had avoided the overwhelming majority of the fleet, and it had to acknowledge some degree of respect for their skill – only sheer chance had revealed them – it paused. They could be bringing a payload of their God’s flesh, the plague. However, they might also be preparing to explain themselves, perhaps beg for mercy, or offer themselves to a healing god who might make them safe to add to the cause.

“Intercept them, but do not fire. Order them to set up communication lines with Us and explain themselves.”

“Yes, Imperator.”

***

The stealth ship’s comms were lit up by an unknown signal. One obviously meant to communicate, and Ritia swore. “We’ve been detected, I’ll try to get us hidden again – “

“No, stop.” The Ambassador Kim gave an order. “If they’ve found us and can’t communicate, they’ll assume we’re here to do something horrible. Remain maneuvering and hard to track, but let me speak to them.”

The hailing screen turned on a moment later, and a massive Eshrioc, no helmet but a titanium crown nestled upon the back of its long, sloping head, and wearing radiant black and gold armor, regarded them.

“We are the Imperator of the Esharioc, the prophet of their gods. You have come, and We would know why.”

“We’re ambassadors of the Hegemony. We’re here to speak with the Esharioc leadership to understand your reasons for initiating this invasion.”

***

The Imperator leaned back on his throne, surprised at their answer. They didn’t know?”

One of the priests, the Imperator’s personal Cleric, Nex’Arra, spoke. “Your Sanctity, I could have them annihilated from here. How dare they claim innocence after what they…”

The Imperator held up a single taloned hand. “Stop. We would hear their answer.” Turning back to the communication screen, it spoke, in Galick this time, the language of these people, that they would understand it. “Very well. We’ll have coordinates linked to you now. When you land, your ship will be searched for weapons of any kind. Any deviation from the flight path my technicians have laid out will result in your deaths, however, We will speak with you. We too, wish to have answers.”

It shut down the communications after the technicians had sent the heretics the flight path and co-ordinates.

The priests began speaking all at once, arguing whether or not they should allow followers of the plague god into the throne room, whether they should be allowed into the presence of the Imperator, as their sovereign ignored them.

Finally, it tired of their bickering. “They will be permitted into this throne room. Regardless of your will, for We have commanded it. We would speak with the heretics and gain our people an answer for the crimes committed against us in the name of their god. We would offer them a chance to explain themselves, and if they communicate with Us without blaspheming themselves, We will have their explanation recorded. The response of these beings in too many cases has been confusion for Us to be wholly uninterested in their explanations, and we have recovered enough conflicting records that We would hear their answer. It may be that they could come to bow before Our gods and earn their place in destroying their own. Do not forget, before the next time you think to countermand Us, that you serve Our will, as We serve Zenitan’s.” Activating a communication device that was hooked in to the new world’s announcement systems, the Imperator spoke. “Do them no harm as they pass. We would have the heretics’ answer.”

***

Galina was trying hard not to panic. They’d been invited, but there were so many obvious traps laid along their path. It would be hard to escape. All the same, no fire came from the planet or their flying escorts. Ritia shared a look as they finally landed. “Good luck, Galina.”

One of the guards pointed at Ritia and hissed with hate, but one of the others seized his arm and spoke. “Imperator caisis viciar nax.” The second guard then spoke into his communication, and returned a stare, then spoke in halting, accented Galick. “The Imperator has ordered that your pilot await in orbit. She shall come to no harm, but will remain off-planet until ordered to extract.”

Ritia glanced at the Ambassador, who nodded. The remaining group, - two humans, one Nathian, and the Vulpexi Endirmas Blorgi, still angered by the death of his cousin, Brimas – were escorted into the Imperator’s throne room.

***

The Imperator of the Esharioc didn’t sit on the throne, or recline, as the Keldebriar emperor, Telrion e’Klae, did. The Esharioc emperor crouched, or perched, hunched over the throne and the room like a spider preparing to devour anything foolish enough to wander into its web. It was massive, as well, with vestigial wings and a half-meter taller even than the Crusaders.

It sat silently as they approached, none of the priests or guards around it bothering – or daring – to move.

Brimas quivered in his exo-shell, both humans looked on, unafraid, and the Nathian kept close to the others, clearly nervous but seeking to make peace. The Imperator spoke. Unlike the guard, It had learned his enemy’s language and learned it well. Brimas reflected that like the old Dominion, merely being evil didn’t make something stupid. But that voice. The Synthor’s mechanical voices had been disturbing, the Sclunter’s howls revolting, the chirping of the Kilick unsettling, and the warcries of the Esharioc soldier had been frightening. The Imperator’s calm, deep, sibilant hiss was far more chilling.

“You have come on behalf of your people to know of our reasons. We will answer, then We will have a question of you, one you will answer before you depart.” The Imperator paused, standing from the throne and becoming uncomfortably close. “We lived in another galaxy. We were one species of thousands. Your pilot’s ancestors brought with them a hateful god that wiped out all but us. Only the Esharioc survived, through the grace of our god. We were able to figure out where the ship that brought the plague god’s cursed prophets originated. We have arrived, and now must deliver a terrible charge: to destroy the plague god, those who follow it must be cleansed.”

Endirmas paused. Then things came together. “The thing you know as the plague god is not our god. It is a disease, a horrid chance of evolution that created a sapient virus known as Kyriion. The same plague ravaged our own galaxy ages ago, killing tens of trillions of people. We’ve managed to contain – “

The Imperator spoke. “Stop. We have obtained records of the acts of the beings in this galaxy. One species of the truly devoted entombed themselves in metal bodies to render themselves safe from the Abomination, and spread it throughout several worlds. We have record that certain of you fought against and eradicated them. We have other records of a species who claimed to defend others from harm suddenly attempt to use the Abomination against other species as a weapon of war. We have seen record We trust that your people struggle against the Abomination. We see other record of your people serving it.”

The Ambassador reeled. “The Synthor were driven mad by Kyriion. The ones who used it as a weapon have been destroyed.”

“They have. But your species Ambassador, especially, are mad. We do not trust them to be so wise as to never raise the Abomination again. We would ask some to join us. To bend before Zenitan, that you may be shielded from the monster. Would you care to know why We allowed you to pass into Our realm?” Without bothering to wait for answer, the Imperator continued. “We allowed it because We had records of many of your peoples struggling against the Abomination, and had developed Our own doubts that your peoples served it of your own will. We chose to give my doubts a chance to be confirmed or discarded. We believe you when you say you do not know, or choose, to serve the Abomination. We therefore offer a chance for survival. Scribe, deliver them the terms We have written.”

One of the scribes knelt before the group of Ambassadors and proffered a piece of paper to them, one set with a seal that matched that on the Imperator’s breastplate. “We would ask that that seal remain unbroken until you return back to your world of Haven. On that scroll will also contain the access codes for a one-use channel to speak directly to Us. Once your leaders have deliberated, speak to Us and deliver your answer to Our demands. Guards. Escort them out, and contact their pilot. They will be allowed to depart unharmed, and their ship will remain in communication until their arrival on Haven. Should they be attacked at any point, those responsible shall be executed. We would prefer to salvage and allow for salvation of the Abomination’s unwilling slaves instead of slaughtering them if possible.”

After the Delegation had left, Nex’arra shuddered at the touch of heresy that they’d felt, watching the Abomination’s pawns walk, hearing them speak as though they were truly innocent. As though their god hadn’t all but destroyed the People.

***

The small group shook, nervously until their arrival back on Haven, where the Imperator’s terms were read aloud to the leadership of the Hegemony as a whole.

“The Esharioc Imperium, in acknowledgement of the threat posed by the Abomination you know as Kyriion and that we speak of as the Plague God, would grant those cursed and held by it a chance to survive our purification. First, all religions other than that of Zenitan, our protector god, are to be banned to create a bulwark of faith against the Abomination.” Hisses of disagreement arose from the representatives of Tyrsians, humans, Keldebriar, Palnt, Nathians, Galri, and Tenebrac, as well as several of the smaller nations present. Each had at least one major faith among them, and none of them would abandon their own for some genocidal invader. “Second, the Ivari and humans are to be turned over for annihilation, the first for their work spreading the abomination, the second for their madness…”

At this, screams of rage erupted. Not just from humans or Ivari. From Vulpexi. From Tyrisian. From Tenebrac. From Galri, Nathians, Palnt, Keldebriar, Dembra, Epomi, Ambrin, everyone spoke in united rage.

The vote took less than three minutes. Then the codes were entered, and the united races of the Hegemony of Free Worlds spoke to the Imperator of the Esharioc. Their answer was delivered by the Hegemon, the conversation broadcast to every system in the galaxy.

“Humanity and the Ivari are among us. The Ivari, for all their past foolishness, did unite much of the galaxy. And humanity has consistently bonded itself to the others. The Galri reject your faith in death. The Palnt, Dembra, and Vulpexi reject your opposition to rational defense against Kyriion. The Keldebrair and Tyrisians will never bow to those who brutalize the unarmed. You would have our answer, Esharioc? If the will of your god is genocide, the Hegemony rejects your god’s madness with the same determination as we reject Kyriion. The Tenebrac will not hide again. The Ivari and humans will not die at the will of mad tyrants.”

The Hegemon continued, pride in her Nathian bloodline swelling in her heart. “As to my own people, we accept as family those who come to us. Those who are human by blood are Nathian by family, and we reject any demand of surrendering our own children, those who’s bloodline parents died fighting to protect others in this galaxy, to you. You have answered our questions about your reason for this invasion, and demanded our answer to your question of surrender, and we will grant it. We do not yield to you. We accept no peace that requires the sacrifice of our own. So we give you one chance, Esharioc. Return to your own galaxy, and never return here. We do not surrender. A declaration of war with one of us is a declaration of war with all of us. That is our answer.”

The Imperator was silent, then spoke. “You have chosen death. It is to Our sorrow that it will be so, for We no longer believe that any of you had any choice in the foul god that has conquered your minds and led you to madness. We will not flee, for Our people have no choice either. A clash between two noble peoples that may only end in blood. Should we triumph, we will build shrines in memory of you, and your tragedy. Farewell.”

***

In the throne room of the Imperator, the Cleric Nex’arra, who remained with Their Sanctity reflected on what they had just heard. Admiration for those damned by the Abomination, and those who stood against them discarding Zenitan’s mercy in favor of protecting madness. How gallant. How foolish. How vile.


	19. Behind the Lines

Adisa crept along on her belly, approaching the lone Esharioc crusader in front of her. The elite Esharioc were always well worth targeting, as they took so long to train and create. A few of the other Viper operatives crept forward to get a better vantage as Adisa’s short, brutal vibrosword – closer to being the short, curved panga in form than the more usual leaf-bladed model – and slashed the monster across the spinal column, dropping him without a sound. His massive mass-driver weapon was too big for her to carry, as was his gravity hammer…though a Tyrsian might have enjoyed the use of either.

A small unit of Crusaders were dealt with by her team, but as tempting a target as a few dozen of the elite enemy troops were for such a small team, they were hardly the primary target at this phase. The Primarch Legion of the Keldebrair had left a while ago, dispersing into the much smaller units so they could cover more ground with devastating hit and run attacks, while the Tenebrae soldiers were similarly spread out, slipping through the wilds and cities and striking at Esharioc before using their camouflage abilities to hide away from the hated invaders before they could be localized and killed.

Adisa was focused on her own task. She’d been sent in to investigate something that that woman from intelligence, Galina, had found. Something about an ultimate weapon the Esharioc were creating. The data that had been recovered was in reference to something called the Final Seals. Apparently, more information on it could be found on this base, on one of the many worlds the Esharioc had terraformed to colonize when they had first arrived. Worlds that had been dead after the first Kyriion plague. She’d read the dispatches, of course, information about how the devastation inflicted on the Esharioc civilization by Kyriion had transformed them from a species no worse than humanity to a religiously fanatical imperial government dedicated to the annihilation or forced conversion of all other life forms.

She’d also heard reports through the LENS network that the enemy had offered the Hegemony a chance for peace if they followed the Esharioc god and turned over humanity and the Ivari for purging. Fortunately the bonding of humanity to every other species had resulted in that request being unanimously shouted down and an equally unanimous vote to fight the war out to the bitter finish. Crawling forward, staying hidden carefully, the Mamba quickly signaled a few other members of the Viper Team she was with to move up and take position to ambush the small squad of Esharioc guards without giving any of them a chance to cry out. Both Shaed and Prian were still with her, but the rest of the unit were all humans.

The Esharioc who were standing guard swept the area with their purging lances – as it turned out those horrific energy weapons of theirs were called – but didn’t fire. The enemy had only just begun moving on when the brutal ripper rounds, those armor piercing, light explosive-tipped depleted uranium teardrops ripping through their armor and dropping them like flies before a single one could raise the alarm. Adisa replaced the now half-empty magazine in her submachine gun with a fresh one before getting her team close to the door. A frangible round, affectionately dubbed a “master-key” sufficed to break the lock and allow the Viper Team to enter. A handful of energy blasts ripped through the small unit preparing to breach the base, blowing apart two of her operatives.

A few of the Viper Team troops fired into the breach, but the Esharioc troopers were quickly gaining the upper hand, almost as if they knew the small unit was coming. Adisa’s quick tactical mind calculated in seconds as she stepped around the cover and fired a quick, sharp burst that dropped one of the troopers keeping her unit pinned, ducking quickly back into cover before any of the enemy could actually get a bead on her.

If the enemy knew they were coming, that meant that this situation was a trap. They’d been offered the easy guards as bait, though that tended to imply that the enemy ground commander, the one known as Graador, was willing to sacrifice troops who’d fought for him for over two hundred years just to draw them in.

But if the enemy had known the small team was coming, they would have moved whatever it was that they were trying to hide instead of being willing to waste troops like that, unless…

Adisa smiled. Unless they’d gotten the intel on very late notice and they hadn’t been able to move the critical systems in time, so they’d settled for setting a very expensive trap to prevent her team from seeing what they were working on and kill them to get a chance to move whatever they were doing before subsequent enemies followed it up. Which meant that whatever the enemy was hiding was worth sacrificing Crusaders and more than a few dozen normal troopers to keep hidden.

But not for long. The enemy were clustered fairly well, in decent cover, and she wasn’t willing to use a more lethal explosive for this, for fear of damaging valuable material or intelligence. Flashbangs were rarely used, and Adisa was in the habit of only carrying one or two at a time, as fragmentation and high explosive tended to be a lot more useful in the kind of combat she was familiar with. “Flashbangs in, heads down.”

The Esharioc had never encountered a flashbang. They had encountered fragmentation grenades, high explosive, pulse grenades from a few mercenary gangs, EMP, and even some of the micronuclear hand rockets gaining popularity as an infantry countermeasure for armored vehicles. They knew what to do when a grenade came their way, moving away. The flash and deafening noise made them stagger, overwhelming the dampeners in their helms as Adisa’s team moved in and cut them down ruthlessly with well-aimed bursts. Moving into the building, the small unit encountered increasing resistance.

_ We don’t have time for this shit _ ,  _ if this is a trap they’re absolutely bringing in reinforcements. And I don’t want to fight any more Crusaders today. They’re damn hard to kill without the element of surprise. _ A blast from a purging lance blistered the titanium wall she was covering behind.

“Okay, fuck these people.” Three rapid bursts for three rapid kills, and she sprinted past the lone survivor, slashing his thorax and spilling his organs with her vibrosword as she passed. “I hate religious zealots.” The other Vipers were getting caught up in firefights with the enemy through the base, and Prian yowled into the comms.

“Mamba, enemy reinforcements are coming. Eight Crusaders.”

That tore it. No way the ten Vipers she had left were up to taking the enemy normals and eight Crusaders at the same time with no way to set an ambush. She knew it was smarter to withdraw but….

Damnit, the other recon groups always said human curiosity was a vice but they needed to know whatever it was that the enemy were so desperate to hide. Ritia spoke through the comms. The smuggler had become incredibly dedicated to the Viper team, and she didn’t want to see them die.

“Mamba, I’m begging you, withdraw. I’m coming down for extraction.”

Shit. Five standard minutes to complete the task then. No time to be careful. She bolted past a few critical firefights, firing her sidearm one-handed to provide the diversion her team needed to gain an upper hand over the hated invaders. The mamba’s reflexes were second to nothing human – and were only barely exceeded by the Keldebriar or her own namesake serpent. Tearing through a door that had until her team gotten there been guarded, she bolted inside and found it empty, and tore out, frantically taking shots at any of the sloping heads of the Esharioc troopers.

Where, where…

She combat rolled through another door. All pretense of an actual ordered raid was gone, the fighting having collapsed into a simple interaction of kill or be killed and a handful of separate and sporadic drag-out brawls between professional killers. She tore through the files and shoved all the data-cards into her pack as rapidly as she could. The rudimentary barricade that had been set up by one of the team welding shut the door to hold off the Crusader unit was immediately breached – or rather, bent horribly out of shape and then torn off its hinges by the force of a pair of mighty blows from a Crusader’s gravity hammer. Shaed blended and slithered off, slipping into another room. “Buy me a few moments, Mamba, and I’ll get the data you need.”

Adisa cursed and ripped the entire half-magazine she’d stowed earlier into the first Crusader, who staggered forward several steps and began firing the monstrous weapon it possessed into the room, scything through three more Vipers before it stumbled to the ground and bled to death from the damage the explosive rounds had done. Two more rushed past, firing all the while.

A grenade, the size of an American football was thrown in and she brutally punted it away before diving into a shielded door and ordering everyone to take cover. The blast of the weapon boiled the flesh off of the corpses of her dead comrades and Adisa screamed inwardly. Those men are dead because I just needed the rest of the intel, and now their families are only getting back a handful of scorched bones. She fired off a few more shots, noting the infuriatingly limited effect it seemed to have on the enemy troops.

Another Viper managed to shoot out the knees of one of the Crusaders and Adisa flashed him a grin. One of the newer members of Viper Team, but that made sense. The knees had smaller plates to disperse the kinetic impact of the rounds, meaning that they were easier to strike, and with the size of those monsters their legs were a critical point. Adisa’s smile turned into a grimace when a few more of the Esharioc’s kinetic rounds tore the other Viper’s flushed face off his skull with the force of their impact.

She replied by executing the one he’d managed to wound, then pulling the next target for the same trick, six rounds to each knee and then five to the head. Three down, five to go, plus about five normals still causing trouble. Shaed’s voice hissed in her earpiece, “A few more moments. The Ivari should arrive in seconds.”

The Crusaders seemed to have learned from the deaths of their brothers in arms and dropped to crouches that kept their massive legs more easily covered, which Adisa realized in fury was the reason that the base had been made so much more massive than the usual targets they’d struck.

This one was high priority, so it needed to be large enough to accommodate the enemy’s elite troops. The firefight they had going was keeping the Esharioc suppressed, but it wasn’t going to actually stop them and Adisa had only a single magazine left. Two of the Crusaders rushed forward, supported by the surviving normal troopers. Adisa emptied her last Ripper magazine into the two Crusaders and dropped the weapon, letting it hang in the sling before switching to her pistol and firing off rapid, desperate, aimed shots at the enemy normals, double-taps, leaving a handful left as Prian pounced and finished them off.

Another one of the Crusaders entered the fray. The giant Esharioc super soldier raised its gravity hammer as it closed with Adisa before the last human member of viper team cranked off his last few rounds in panic fire, managing to destroy the machinery at the head of the gravity hammer that made it instantly devastating. The massive alien still struck Adisa in the right shoulder with the weapon, now merely a ruined hunk of scrap metal instead of a gravity-warping maul that could strike with enough force to shatter the armor of a tank.

It was, however, still a heavy piece of metal being swung by an incredibly strong Esharioc supersoldier, so it still broke the legendary operative’s arm and shoulder, as well as sending her lancer pistol flying away in pieces. Adisa herself rolled away from the blow, desperately throwing herself towards one of her fallen comrades and seizing his partially-full ripper, barely avoiding the fire of the remaining two crusaders as the one who’d just stunned her began crushing the skull of her last human comrade with his destroyed weapon and gave it the remaining rounds just as her friend fell.

The Crusader stumbled and fell as another finally threw aside its cumbersome gun and attempted bring its own gravity hammer to bear on Adisa, who rolled away from the crushing weapon and swiped her vibrosword at its ankle, leading it to stumble where she could cut its throat.

Shaed’s voice came through her ear. “It was worth it, Viper.” The Tenebrac’s voice sounded dead. “The intel we just recovered may well save the Hegemony. Make all the difference in this war. Extract, I’m clear.”

Adisa chuckled bitterly. “Bit late for that.” The last crusader was on top of her when Prian, bleeding from dozens of wounds inflicted by the Esharioc’s shockswords, pounced again and sank his blades into the final Crusader’s back, dropping it to the ground and beheading it before hauling Adisa to her feet.

“The Keldebrair do not abandon their comrades. We have to flee. Move.” Adisa stumbled, the two wounded master killers supporting one another as they staggered away from the site of the battle. The site was secured, and they rapidly moved towards the extraction point.

Then the comms rang again.

“LZ’s too hot. We’ll circle back around.”

Prian spat. Adisa groaned. “Knew this would be how it would…”

A new group of enemy troops approached the battered warriors and prepared to take aim as Adisa and Prian dropped to the ground, raising the weapons they’d managed to recover and preparing to go to their graves like fighters. “It will be an honor, Mamba.” Prian’s paw gripped Adisa’s hand, and she squeezed the Keldebrair’s paw back.

“Yeah. Good luck, Prian. See you on the other side.” The bitterness was there, yes, but it was receding. If she was going to die, it was going to be back to back with one of the few true equals she’d ever met against a nightmarish opponent. And they’d made a difference in the galaxy.

By unspoken signal, the two fighters reached around and took aim, only to hear the scream of an atmospheric ion drive sweeping in from on high, along with the agonized hissing of the Esharioc troopers who writhed beneath the drive’s ionizing radiation discharge as the hatch of a very familiar Ivari smuggling ship opened up.

“Told you we’d come back around. We were never going to leave you behind to die.” The two soldiers staggered aboard with Shaed’s help, and the hatch was immediately sealed as the craft soared skyward and punched to hyperspace the instant they were sufficiently far from the interdictor of the planet itself.

“The seals…they have a weapon capable of shattering planets. There’s at least two of them. And we know where they are. Our work today saved billions of lives. Adisa…the people we lost…they mattered.”

Adisa took a breath, the pain washing through the receding adrenaline now, and grunted. She had lost friends today, but the mission had been accomplished. The idea of a planet-killing superweapon…

“Glad we could find out. I don’t want to lose anyone else. Patch me through to high command. I need to request an all-volunteer raid. It’ll be big, but it’ll end the war faster. I need to kill the Imperator.”


	20. They Will Not Pass!

[Listen to:  [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRuReY4G-a0 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRuReY4G-a0) ]

[Also:  [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jTgkTEDDog ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jTgkTEDDog) ]

The guns were still booming in the distance, each impact shaking the foundations of the bunkers, the shields and bunkers still holding as the Hegemonic Guard and the Esharioc invaders traded fire at the distance between them. Atmospheric craft had, as an approach, been abandoned after the first three months due to the megawatt lasers and heavy-hitting surface-to-air mass drivers. The last few weeks had been a slog for the Guard, even Sanctum Guard, now slowly being rotated out to where the refugees were being taken.

The artillery had kept firing, as had the snipers, the menacing hiss and hypersonic crack of railgun fire audible even through the helmets, but the average soldier, at least in this sector, had mostly just been discouraging the enemy from advancing whenever possible. The Esharioc armored vehicles and heavy troops would come up and then railguns, plasma weaponry, the enemy mass drivers, grenades, purging lances and occasionally melee weaponry would come into lethal and devastating effect. The battle of Bastion continued brutally and unabated.

2Lt. Joan Bonhauer was exhausted from the fighting. Smith - no, not Smith, he’d gotten unlucky a few weeks back when the enemy had tried to flank them, this was the new guy – was taking a sight with his gauss rifle and taking a few shots at a small Esharioc unit attempting to advance, leaping between the craters blasted into the ground by artillery as they did.

Clever xenomorph fucks. She joined in the fire, sending high-velocity tungsten teardrops at the enemy troops whenever they jumped up. Soon her fire was joined by dozens of other Guardsmen who, finally having a clear target after weeks of exchanging fire with an enemy they could usually barely see, were all too eagerly taking out their losses with a vengeance. Any hesitation they’d had about killing the Esharioc was gone now, whittled away by the horror of the reports trickling in about the full nature of the Esharioc invasion. The few Esharioc who had attempted the advance were cut down, the wounded attempting to crawl back to the fortifications their force had built but were cut down on the attempt to retreat. Joan would have flinched at that, once. Before she knew why they were here, before the reports had come in about the things that had happened in a few other places. She might once have said that many Esharioc had been indoctrinated, as it turned out was the case. But now?

“No mercy for the misguided.” Her gauss rifle thrummed, and the hypersonic crack of the high-velocity tungsten teardrop rang out as another Esharioc fell. The enemy artillery started up again, this time at a much greater tempo and with what sounded like a far more focused attack on the Sanctum Guard’s position. Hundreds of enemy tanks came tearing towards them, the grenades and heavy weapons of Sanctum guard firing in return to attempt to break up the rush as the artillery desperately attempted to re-zero on the enemy position. A handful of Tyrisian guardsmen carrying heavier weapons cut loose with them, spitting heavy kinetic projectiles at the armored vehicles even as the Esharioc’s own elite troops opened fire in return, the actinic fire that trailed their mass driver rounds like silver lightning illuminating the dusk as the rounds impacted the ferrocrete bunker with resounding cracks.

The fight swung each way for a moment before the gigawatt heavy lasers were finally charged enough to fire, the bright flash of coherent light almost blinding as the brutal cutting beams scythed across the killzone and began cutting into the Esharioc armored vehicles and crippling, though not actually destroying them. The artillery-fired cluster mines were enough to gut the vehicles, and a handful of the Guard’s own armored vehicles raced out onto the field, guns blazing in a counterstrike to attempt to drive the enemy forces back across the no-being’s-land. The racing vehicles, with their assorted weaponry, outflanked the Esharioc and cut into the enemy front, brutally rolling it up from either side with devastating efficiency. Joan was starting to relax when a purging lance pulse by sheer chance managed to pass through the firing slit of the shields and sublimate the soldier next to her, dousing her armor in the hapless Keldebriar’s steaming fluids.

Joan, for her part, returned fire, tears leaking down her cheeks inside her helmet, shocked at the sudden loss of a friend she’d been fighting side by side with for the better part of a Terran year. She returned fire, as one did, even as the artillery started going again, slamming into the bunkers and rattling her teeth as more Guard troopers who’d been in reserve trickled into the bunker through the tunnels that connected the front to the rear area. Fire lanced back and forth across the field, and after a few tense hours of fumbling for more magazines in the crate, the fighting settled back into the lull of exchanged artillery and sniper fire that had preceeded the intense skirmish.

The armored vehicles had continuously been ground down, but thus far the Guard’s armor was holding its own against the Esharioc. That, coupled with the expertise of the artillerymen, the tenacity of the infantry and the impressive construction the Engineering Corps had brought with it upon its trickled-in arrival over two months prior had managed to stand off the invasion for a while.

Every day, more stealth ships slipped through the orbital siege to deposit companies of guardsmen and extract small groups of the civilian populace who hadn’t made it out before the siege had locked in. The shielding systems of the planet prevented orbital bombardment, which had been a relief, but they couldn’t stop the Esharioc from bringing reinforcements either, and as casualties continued to mount on both sides, with the Guard being reinforced far more slowly than the invading force – though admittedly also taking casualties far more slowly, - the enemy was likely to eventually grind them down.

Even better, Wolf Division, the Furies and the Primarch Legion were off-world and more than capable of quickly arriving as the cavalry whenever necessary. Supposedly the occupation on Aldian IV had been badly mauled by Primarch raids, and there were even some reports of a notorious pirate ship attacking the Esharioc supply lines, making the enemy position every bit as tenuous as their own.

Still…she thought as she began lying down for her shift sleeping, the hypersonic cracks of sniper fire and the booming of artillery no longer troubling her. She’d helped hold Bastion for ten Terran months at this point, waiting to

***

She was woken up at the end of her sleep shift as the guns continued blazing in the night, took a bit of the rations specifically marked for human consumption – to differentiate between those for Tyrisians, Keldebriar, Dembra and Tenebrae, though the latter two were remarkably rare in the Guard, Dembra because their species had withdrawn more and more from its military role and Tenebrae because their warriors preferred reconnaissance and assassination to mainline fighting – and with their natural camouflage, they were better at it. Joan ate almost mechanically as the artillery continued to shake dust from the ceiling; despite shielding the blasts were still having some effect.

Once she’d eaten and gotten a bit of water, she took up her weapon and a new set of magazines and began scanning the twilight of the early dawn on Bastion for any movement of the Esharioc force, attempting to see if they were advancing. The sniper – it would be Nichols, at this shift – was taking shots almost metronomically, one per second at any enemy they saw from their perch, through the scope. Joan thought she could see something moving in her field of view and fired a quick three round burst from her Gauss rifle. The figure stopped moving, so presumably she’d killed it.

***

Graador watched from afar on the viewscreen as the war continued to unfold. The heretics were putting up a courageous fight against the onslaught, with every move he made countered with tenacity and skill he’d not seen equaled during the Unification Wars. The flanking armored vehicles had clashed before each side had been forced to withdraw in good order, with neither of them in any continue to pursue or press the attack against their opponents.

The infantry and even his Crusaders were struggling to breach the main line in the main front, and among the infantry who’d managed to infiltrate around the flanks of the main front – Bastion possessed only one colossal landmass and because of weather patterns it was only really practical to land on one side of that continent – there were ever mounting losses from explosives and the regiments of Guardsmen who fought street-to-street and were more than happy to employ mines, ambushes, and brutal hand-to-hand fighting to swamp his troopers.

For all that he was slowly being forced to admire the slaves of the Abomination, Graador focused on doing his duty in breaking through and destroying the FTL inhibitor that prevented the main body of the invasion from advancing. To admire a tenacious enemy was natural, if foolish, to pity one, redundant.

To show mercy, heretical.

***

Bonhauer watched the enemy assault sweep across the no-beings’-land as the mines once again tore through the front ranks, the tanks sweeping in from the flanks as the entrenched infantry of the guard began firing and the pounding of the artillery started up once again. Her own rounds tumbled into the enemy troopers, dropping them to the ground, hissing in pain as the assault continued. The fire flickered back and forth, artillery barrages intensifying as each side attempted to suppress each other’s fire.

The next seven hours were a nightmare for Joan, snaking through the tunnels and sprinting bunker to bunker in order to gain better positions as the battle raged, the guard’s full force in this sector mobilized at once in a desperate effort to repel the massive assault. She was fighting beside a Tyrsian soldier who carried a megawatt laser before he shifted out towards another position, leaving her next to a Keldebrair, who eventually stayed in one bunker as a handful of humans joined her in the third, only to fall around her a few at a time until the person next to her was another Tyrsian, this one with a shredder cannon who drove back the Ehsarioc who’d gotten far, far too close as the battle came frighteningly close to getting down to melee combat. The continued fighting eventually ended in a Hegemonic victory, leaving Joan too tired and relieved to stand when she got the word that the enemy had withdrawn again. Sinking down as she slid down the wall of the bunker, she only barely registered that the Guard’s last armored vehicles had managed to brutally maul the Esharioc flank before being cut off and devastated by their own heavy armor and their Crusading forces.

Still. For the day, Bastion still stood.


	21. Counterstrike, Reprise

[ [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q6chUtSef4 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q6chUtSef4) ] 

The Star Marshall of the United Hegemony of Free Worlds was standing in front of a group of officers of Third Armada, however, XO. Silvanus Hanes and Commander Shiloh Hendrix of Lion Fleet were both present, as were the officers of Imperial Shield, Tiger Squadron, and Star Apex. In addition, a squadron of Ivari and Tenebrae pilots who flew the new Wraith platform, one specifically designed for orbital bombardment.

“Thanks to intelligence recovered by Viper Team deep in the occupied zones, we’ve discovered several Esharioc superweapons known as the Oblivion Seals, weapons capable of destroying entire planets. However, they only have four of them. We’ve discovered the locations of two of them, and it is the focus of this operation to destroy those two before they can be used. One of them, which we’ve dubbed the Ragnarok is in a system with heavy anti-ship defenses, and we’re going to be using Tiger Squadron and Star Apex to break through them and torpedo the central reactor. The other system has considerably less static defense, but has a heavy enemy fleet presence, and to destroy that target we’re going to task the Lion Fleet and Imperial Shield to attack in force and destroy the second Seal, dubbed Tartarus. Third Armada will strike against the forces pressuring the shipyards at Carsai to prevent any of them from peeling off to attack either group. Wraith Squadron, however, is to engage on the new Esharioc core world with a terror bombing to keep them occupied there. This is going to require a lot of speed and precision, so we’re sending our best. Make sure we’re right in assuming that’s you. Operation commences in 72 standard hours. Get some rest and brief your people. Dismissed.”

***

“Tiger Squadron,” Amelia began, as Jake and Callie took in the briefing, along with the rest of the Squadron. “In a few short days we have a high-priority mission to engage and destroy a high-priority enemy target. The Esharioc have brought with them several massive weapons called the Oblivion Seals, which are weapons capable of destroying planets. We know the locations of two of them, and we’ll be operating alongside the Keldebriar’s Star Apex. Our objective is to dodge the point defenses, get inside the system and torp the core reactor before egressing. The other Seal is to be dealt with by a combined task force of Imperial Shield and Lion Fleet. Wraith Squadron and Third Armada are both being called in to attack other Esharioc positions just to keep them occupied and cause damage and chaos, so it’s absolutely critical that we succeed. There’s a lot of lives going to be lost on this op, let’s make sure to make it matter.”

***

Hendrix and Silvanus were looking over the plan, along with the rest of Lion Fleet’s assorted ship commanders, who would in their turn brief their own crews. After the briefing was over, Hendrix turned to Silvanus. “Pulled your record, Lieutenant. Are you and Violet doing okay?”

Silvanus nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Violet’s okay. Just nervous about me being so far from home. But we’ll manage.”

Shiloh Hendrix nodded, once. “Good. Pulled your psych profile as well. The Galri can fix the issue you have, you know that, right?” Silvanus nodded, quietly. Shiloh paused. “At any rate, just wanted to know a bit more about you. Prior service in the Dominion war, stayed out of the Alliance/Federation conflict, re-enlisted towards the end of the Marauder War, stayed on. What made you re-enlist?”

“Needed something to do with myself, to make a difference while my wife and I figured out what to do next. I actually started getting treatment for the genetic issues from the Galri a while back, but the treatment they’ve got me on takes time. Should be resolved in another standard year.”

Hendrix clapped him on the shoulder. “Good. Now. Get some rest. We’ve got a really hard operation coming up.”

***

Dastn y’Tas and Emril e’Var looked at the battle plans. The operation would have to be fast. Emril and Shiloh Hendrix had spoken about the heavier fleet plan to prepare for Lion Fleet and Imperial Shield’s combined operation, and Dastn was preparing to contact Amelia Minas to co-ordinate Star Apex and Tiger Squadron. “Emril.” Dastin spoke to the more senior officer.

“Yes?”

“What we’re doing. Should we really be destroying the Seals instead of trying to capture them? The enemy are clearly outside the codes entirely, and we may need to do something…”

Emril hit him. Not hard, just a cuff of the type that Keldebriar used to communicate how far outside the acceptable a question or request was. “No. Our emperor would decide if we needed to take a step that drastic, and you know the price of making such a decision. Besides which. A world-killer is a weapon that should not exist, and could never be used by a being acting inside the codes. To destroy them, even if they were built by allies, would be a moral necessity.”

Dastn nodded and saluted. “Right. We keep to the code. We preserve life, and kill only the warriors of the enemy.”

***

The operation started for Third Armada as so many others did. Drop out of warp, engage nearby targets, reactive formation to allow rapid shifts in positioning to counter enemy maneuvering, brutally firing both kinetic and energy weapons at all non-friendly contacts. The armada’s attack took the fleet attempting to seize the Carsai shipyards by surprise. The commander of the Armada swore under his breath, excited at the advantage they’d gained. “Hit them hard, hopefully the enemy let us draw more of their fleet here, away from the Seal and let us give them a real ass-kicking.” A few hours later, dozens more Esharioc ships began warping into the system.

***

The heavy fleets struck into the system with the Tartarus Seal and struck quickly at the light ships guarding the area, quickly shattering them with heavier kinetic and energy weapons as they passed, noting that Third Armada’s counterstrike at Carsai had apparently drawn a number of enemy ships into that battle, allowing Lion Fleet and Imperial Shield to focus the full force of their guns on the handful of enemy ships left, then turn their heaviest weaponry on the Tartarus Seal.

The Seal was massive, a single, long tube over eighty kilometers in length and over three kilometers wide, bound in the center of a massive circular construction by eight long support beams, like the spokes of a wheel. The monstrous construction was heavily armored, the reactors and systems in the wheel housing the engines and shield generators while the massive cylinder likely contained the weapon system that would be used to destroy planets. The Nova bombs of Lion Fleet streaked towards the ring, slamming home and tearing wide swathes of the armor apart, melting others, as the kinetic guns and the energy weapons pounded and scythed away the armor, Imperial Shield’s weaponry ripping great gouges out of the weapon as well, sublimating the alloy that had forged the massive ship into plasma that drifted forlornly into space.

The battle was going according to plan, the Seal being badly damaged as many of the smaller ships risked getting closer to devastate the shield generators so that the missile boats could strike directly at the planet-killer’s core machinery.

***

The Khan’s carrier deck opened and the Raksashas soared free to engage. Callie might have been nervous, but she couldn’t deny the excitement she felt at the impossible target ahead, especially the idea that the Squadron would be able to add something like this to the list of things it had brought down. The shudder of exhilaration that went down her back at Jake’s growl of “Fangs out!” was a welcome one, letting her forget for a moment that they’d had to re-enter a deadly war to protect their family.

Still, seeing the handful of enemy fighter squadrons soar out of their hangars to engage, only to have Star Apex hit them in a pincer move while Tiger Squadron wove in between the clashing formations, adding its own firepower to the mix was satisfying and nerve-wracking all at once. Spooling up her guns as the first Esharioc fighter entered her cross hairs and stroking the trigger to tear apart a foe that had come to her galaxy to kill her family and her people was glorious, and from the quick banter exchanged by and between the squadrons, including Jake’s own quiet chuckles and quick chatter, the rest of those who’d come to participate in this battle more than agreed.

A handful of shots sparked off her shields before that Ivari pilot, Ywyn, cut up from underneath and shattered the pursuing Ehsarioc fighter with a quick burst to its belly and Callie grinned. “Punkhawk, you are a badass! Thanks for the save. I’m going to… Jake, take the one on her tail.”

The Raksasha that plunged from above to take out the Inquisitor – as the Ehsarioc fighters had become known – streaked past the target as it was destroyed like a scarlet-and-azure lightning bolt and carried on the battle while Callie and Ywyn one more wheeled to rejoin the fight as Dastn’s pleased yowl came through the comms, shredding enemy fighters and co-ordinating his unit’s movements with the squadron that had once captured him, whose leaders it had once captured in return.

“Alright, the last of the shield generators are down, let’s get in that big ugly fucker and drop a torpedo into the core, then we’re out of here!”

***

Wraith Squadron had exited hyperspace in orbit above the world the Esharioc had claimed and terraformed as their new home. Now the tiny antimatter payloads were dropping, dozens at a time, spread out to do as much damage as possible and devastate as much as they could. The attack was meant to be punitive, to damage and devastate the invader and cripple their ability to make war, while demonstrating in no uncertain terms that no mercy or restraint would be shown by the Hegemony in its fight to survive against a genocidal invader. They struck at the palace that had been constructed for the Imperator, and finding it too well shielded to break through, they’d moved on to factories, barracks, alloy foundries, farms, mines, generators, anything and everything that would damage the Esharioc and thin out what they could afford to throw at their invasion. The bombing might only have been a diversion, but they were going to fight like it was an assault in earnest.

***

The Imperator had ordered as many of its people into bunkers to survive the orbital bombardment as possible, knowing full well that many of them would die as the bombs continued to drop, still hoping it could save the bulk of them. Nex’arra, the priest who followed it around, spoke their own concerns. “Your Sanctity, they’re laying waste to our production capacity. I’ve sent orders for fighter squadrons to arrive and drive them off, but this will have done serious damage to us before the raid is over.”

“We are aware. For now, there is little anyone, even Us, can do about it, so we will wait for the enemy to expend their effort and meet their end. They cannot expect to stop us with such a raid, and We suspect they are acting to buy the defenders of Bastion time before any of our reinforcements arrive there. How little they know.”

Nex’arra nodded, the Imperator knew best. But they couldn’t help admire the raw courage of the enemy, who fought so bravely against the unstoppable tide. Still, the Imperator was the voice of Zenitan, above reproach, and Their Sanctity had ordered the cleansing of this galaxy. The will of Zenitan would be done.

***

Third Armada was being cut off, they realized. They’d done their job a bit too well, even as the enemy fighter squadrons reunited with their carriers and began leaving the system, the other Esharioc ships were rapidly coming to surround them, despite the corvette component of his own fleet managing to outflank and picket the enemy cruisers and pick them off a few at a time, the commander of Third Armada was rapidly realizing that this might finally be the end of the battle. Couldn’t retreat yet, didn’t want to give the enemy a reason to think the real fight was elsewhere. He ordered his destroyers to attempt to get closer to the enemy battleships and attack them from multiple angles, while his own flagship attacked the enemy cruisers. “All hands, continue attacking. In the name of the Terran Republic and the Keldebriar Empire, we will contain them here!”

***

Lion Fleet was slowly but surely delivering a murderous hammering to the Tartarus Seal, even as enemy ships started arriving in attempt to drive them off. The enemy began the attack, the heavy shielding of Lion Fleet and the shock and speed tactics of Imperial Shield outmatching the assault, aided by the missile frigates’ of both fleets combined and devastating barrage that cut apart the enemy formation and allowed the destroyers and corvettes to drive off the surviving Esharioc forces.

The Nemean covered the Proud Hunt as the two flagships flew right in front of the openings at either end of the cylinder and fired their most massive warheads, gigaton-payload antimatter bombs that ignited the unmistakable silver-white fire of an antimatter explosion in the core of the Tartarus seal, one that rapidly spiraled into dozens more as the fleet blasted away to press an attack on another enemy formation in a nearby system.

***

Tiger Squadron was still dancing with the enemy guns and darting in while Star Apex wheeled all around. Jake, Callie, and Ywyn had been chosen to enter the cylinder itself and strike the core directly. The ascent up the cylinder’s barrel was tight, and to Ywyn at least, it was all to reminiscent of a scene from a film her human squadmates had showed her a few nights prior on the carrier. As though they were flying up the barrel of a massive gun, and no sooner had they seen the reactor that would apparently power an energy weapon designed to superheat the cores of planets until their atoms broke apart, the targeting computers thrummed the affirmative and the three master pilots fired all of their antimatter torpedoes simultaneously, wheeling around without checking if the weapons had hit properly and punching to warp before they’d even escaped the barrel, not willing to attempt to outrun the annihilation to follow at sublight speed, signaling to all to get clear.

They re-entered realspace at the edge of the system, and rapidly sped back towards the battle they’d just left as the Ragnarok seal was torn open, silver-white fire ripping into it from the inside and tearing it apart. Amelia’s voice and Dastn’s both shouted out to withdraw, the two squadrons of the best starfighter pilots in the galaxy – and from what they’d seen of the Esharioc, possibly the universe – having accomplished their mission yet again.

“Eat your heart out, Skywalker! You didn’t manage it until the last minute, we did this like fucking masters!”

Coming from Ywyn, who had admittedly been picking up more and more human expressions over her time with the squadron, that was one of the funniest things any of Tiger Squadron had ever heard, and for a moment, even the music that they had been playing over the comms was drowned out in laughter.

***

The bombing had finished on the world of Zenitas, and Nex’arra was relieved. The bombing had killed a few million, but compared to the teeming billions their empire consisted of, horrific as the losses were, they were manageable. Their Sanctity turned to them, and spoke. “As We said, Cleric, you had little to fear. Zenitan gives Us the knowledge needed to win this war. The enemy bombers have withdrawn. We took painful, but not damning, losses and will be able to rebuild. It is as We have said. The slaves of the Abomination will not stop the Crusade of survival.”

Nex’arra bowed before the Imperator. “As you say, Your Sanctity. I was –“ Before they could finish, the throne room was hailed by Admiral Tusaroth. “Your Sanctity, I must report a grievous loss. Two of the Oblivion Seals have been attacked and destroyed, and there is little to no progress on finding the raiding ship “Ghost of Sparta” that has been attacking our supply convoys as yet. The enemy suffered the loss of a full armada in this battle, and no few losses of fighters and ships in other fleets, while our own losses of ships were minimal, but the heretics seem to have made excellent use of the intelligence their damnable “Viper” teams recovered. I apologize, Your Sanctity, I offer my life as –“

The Imperator paused, its wings flickering in barely contained rage. “Take the final seal and prepare to use it. This invasion must be carried forward quickly and brought to a close. We do not take your life, Admiral, you have served Us and the people well, and the Abomination clouded the work of its slaves from Our sight. We do not fault you for failing to see what We could not. Give them the judgement they have earned.”

Nex’arra heard and reeled. Perhaps the Abomination could have concealed movement from Tusaroth’s sight, but to conceal it from the Imperator, the Mouth of Zenitan, was madness, Zenitan had shielded them from the Abomination’s direct attempt to destroy them all. A thought came to Nex’arra then, a horrible, terrifying, guilty, heretical one. One they’d had before, at the sight of that delegation, but that they’d managed to ignore, to discard, to shun from their own mind.

What if the enemy served other gods, not the Abomination? Ones that had shielded them from it, and from the Imperator’s designs?

What if the Imperator was wrong?

To merely think such a thing was heresy of the highest order, the kind that got one purged as a pawn of the Abomination, and yet…

The Imperator had thought the bombing had been the objective. So the Imperator could be wrong. What if the Imperator was wrong about other things, as well?


	22. Rescue Operation

The skies over the third sector of Bastion were crimson in the morning light. The battle had been waged ferociously for three weeks since the news had come in that the enemy’s superweapons had been destroyed, but the Guard had been worn down over the almost full standard year they’d been holding the positions on the fortress world against the Esharioc’s onslaught. The engineering corps who’d been smuggled in to help fortify had done their jobs bravely, and had managed to jury-rig the Guard’s defenses, allowing the defenders to last longer, fight harder, get more out of their armor’s energy packs. 

But as of two standard weeks ago, their last remaining armored vehicle column had shattered a flanking force to the west, and had been cut off and wiped out to the last man, meaning that there was no mobile strike force to prevent the Esharioc from flanking the Guard’s position. As long as they’d been able to keep a mobile group going, they’d forced the hated invaders into brutal battle after brutal battle and casualty-heavy assaults that had ground down the invading force, but with the strategic shift, it was becoming rapidly apparent that the guard position would soon be completely surrounded, allowing the Esharioc to roll up their lines and devastate them in detail. To make matters worse, the bunkers past the lines were still packed with civilians and Aid Corps personnel who hadn’t been evacuated before the orbital siege had begun, meaning that the Guard’s loss would result in millions of innocent lives being ended.

Even worse, with Bastion taken, the Esharioc would eventually be able to find the controls for the interdiction system that prevented them from passing through the system. Meaning that once Bastion was destroyed, the main force of the Esharioc invasion could proceed, and quickly, through several populated worlds to strike Haven itself. Joan sighed. After all this, the fighting was rapidly going to come to a close, especially given the arrival of over half a billion new Esharioc troops.

***

Second and Fourth Armadas blazed into the Bastion system, weapon systems ready and prepared to shred the Esharioc’s bladed craft as they opened fire on the fleets guarding Bastion. Following them were Lion Fleet, Imperial Shield, and both Tiger Squadron and Star Apex, cutting rapidly through the besieging craft as transport fleets streamed in to pick up the refugees as quickly as they could, as well as dropping off several fresh divisions of the Hegemonic Guard.

***

Major General Hann Jaegar was preparing to drop onto the embattled world of Bastion. After three weeks of brutal, heavy fighting on Aldian IV, he’d been sent back from the galaxy’s eastern front to engage on the center line and help drive the invader off of Bastion, pushing open the enemy formation and mauling it badly enough to allow the refugees and Sanctum Guard to withdraw, along with the Engineering corps. He stepped into the drop pod and prepared to hit the battlefield running. “Wolf Marines, we’re going to hit the enemy on the western flank hard and fast, cut their advance to pieces and allow the civvies to escape.” Jaegar’s battle-scarred face split in an ironic grin as he muttered, “Nicht ein schlacht, ein rettungsakton.” The quote was an old one, from his native German, not in Galick. It seemed fitting for the battle to come.

***

The Guard units at the flank had put up a valiant fight but as the Esharioc forces bore down on them, Joan rapidly realized that the defenses of Bastion would be broken within the day unless something…

Then she saw the flashes above, and the streaking flame behind the drop pods of Wolf Division, along with the furious troops erupting from them and unleashing a swathe of devastation through the Esharioc’s newly taken positions. She felt herself tearing up under the helmet as the soldiers all around her cheered and the combined fire of the wolves and the rapidly deploying Guardsmen swept the Esharioc assault back from their position. The Wolves leapt skyward with the assistance of the jetpacks on their assault armor, rapidly coming to a flanking position as the enemy began gaining angles on them, even as Jaegar’s voice rang out over the comms. “Sanctum Guard, fire your artillery at the co-ordinates I’m transmitting now, then have your infantry retake bunkers six, eight, four, and three. Be prepared to set up a net of fire after the boys and I cut these assholes to pieces!”

Joan shook herself, energy refilling her exhaustion-numbed limbs as hope surged through her again. “You heard the general, shift your asses! We’ve got civvies to cover and a counterstrike to make use of!”

The Esharioc forces were slowly being pushed away and as Joan got to the third bunker and took up a firing position again, taking quick, rapid shots as the artillery started pounding down at the enemy soldiery who were scrambling to brace for Wolf Division’s furious onslaught. Even those who attempted to escape the wolves and artillery were forced into close contact with the fire of the guard, now re-fortified in their positions and firing as ferociously as ever.

***

Jaegar laughed madly as he carried forward the assault, when suddenly a voice sounded in his comms. Young, female. His daughter. “Dad, holy crap, I’m so glad you came. I thought we were going to die here. Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Jaegar was shaken. He hadn’t realized Jessie had gone with the engineers sent to Bastion, but he recovered quickly and replied, “Of course. These Esharioc fucks aren’t going to touch you.” He signaled one of the regiments under him to assault the armored column as it advanced towards the Guard’s eastern flanks.

He took the regiment under his direct command down to attack the withdrawing bodyguard of the Esharioc commander known as General Graador, the premiere enemy ground commander. If he could kill Graador, he might just be able to force the enemy to withdraw from Bastion, at least long enough to allow the Guard to get a breather and finish the extraction of the refugees – and my daughter, Jaegar added internally. He plummeted into the trenches the Esharioc had created for themselves, his troops taking advantage of their jump packs to vault between the craters the artillery had gouged from the ground and used them for cover, leapfrogging between the craters-turned-foxholes and taking up firing positions until one became untenable, then jumping to the next and beginning the cycle again, as the enemy reeled to counter them.

Joan smiled grimly as she watched the Wolf Marines rip into the invaders and push them back as the Sanctum Guard continued firing into the enemy soldiers now desperately scrambling to push forward and continue the attack on Bastion, no longer doing it to take territory but merely to break out of the encirclement they now found themselves in by pressing against the component most weakened by the earlier fighting. The guard held on, just barely, through sheer defiance and stubborn will, even as the brutal combat got down to hand to hand, the vibrosabers of the guard and the brutal shock blades of the Esharioc coming into play as the two groups closed with each other, Joan swinging her sword and firing her Lancer as quickly as she could at the enemy before her, just barely managing to duck a heavy swing and ram her sword into the visor of one Esharioc’s helm while planting her pistol under the chin of a second before pulling the trigger.

Jaegar pressed the assault and continued driving the Esharioc before his forces, watching them panic and internally screaming with exultation as he sent high velocity tungsten ripping through the hated invading force that had dared come near his daughter. After so long serving away from his family, he’d damn well make the difference in her survival. “Come and get it you alien freaks! My name is Hann fucking Jaegar, veteran of every fucking war the Hegemony and Terran Republic have fought and you monsters are not leaving this planet alive!” He pressed the attack, ripping apart their lines, hitting even the bunkers they’d set up and throwing his grenades in, watching the tiny micronuclear charges send gouts of actinic fire that tore apart the pitiful alien soldiery who’d come to attack the Hegemony. It was an almost impersonal assault, neither Jaegar nor anyone else even waited to see the grenades go up behind them, merely jumping further, firing all the way and breaking out their vibrosabers whenever they closed with the Esharioc sufficiently to deal with the enemy in a more hands-on manner.

The sickly yellow blood of the Esharioc had coated his armor, and Jaegar was smiling ferociously. Graador had apparently withdrawn from the center line, but the scanners were indicating that the enemy general was rapidly re-locating somewhere else with the backing of tens of thousands of Crusaders and heavy armored vehicles, obviously intending to cut off the refugees from being able to withdraw, and Jaegar cursed loudly.

“Sanctum Guard, we’ll try to interfere with the enemy flanking movement. Take your heavy guardian armor and hold the position open to allow the civilians and engineers to withdraw. The normal guard can hold the regular fortresses. You have to start evacuating the civilians, quickly!”

***

[switch to this music here:  [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGtEH1i78sI ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGtEH1i78sI) ]

Joan got her orders and in the heavy armor, her and her unit began pulling Aid Corps, civilians and engineers out of the bunkers, all the while throwing up a wall of fire between the civilians and the enemy soldiery, keeping the enemy at bay as Wolf Division launched a massive attack, even as she glanced back and forth between the ongoing battle and the scanners that indicated an even larger Esharioc force approaching to flank Jaegar’s unit from the other side.

***

Jaegar, for his part, was aware of the approaching force. He was closing on General Graador, his marines dying by the dozens killing Esharioc and pushing them back. The counterstrike was ferocious, but his own ranks were thinning rapidly. Glancing at the scanner and realizing what Graador had managed to do with his reserves, Jaegar suddenly felt very tired.

Well then. It was over for him. The division needed to continue to leap around, cutting through enemy flankers to allow Sanctum guard to hold open the egress long enough that the civilians and non-combat personnel would be allowed to escape. Which meant that neither he nor his marines were going to be able to withdraw before the Eshrarioc managed to corner them.

Communicating as much to his officers, he led a ferocious charge to get himself within striking distance of Graador, figuring that if the wolves were to die today, they’d do it ripping out the throat of the enemy’s ground forces. He spun into close quarters with the Esharioc Crusaders, shooting and hacking away with vibroswords whilst avoiding both the enemy mass drivers and gravity hammers to the greatest degree that they could.

The first rush was repelled, leaving hundreds of wolves on the ground, dead and dying, and he made a second, vaulting behind them and cutting through a dozen crusaders with his railgun before being repulsed again. Now even the implacable Major General was panting, exhausted, as his forces leaped skyward to engage another enemy flanking force and he and a single battalion rushed the handful of exhausted enemy crusaders surrounding their general once more, finally getting to grips with Graador and dodging around the gravity hammer before plunging his blade into the Esharioc commander’s heart.

Ripping the weapon free and beheading the invading commander, Jaegar rushed to the next position, attempting to shatter a flanking maneuver, rapidly realizing that for the hundreds of thousands of casualties the wolves had inflicted, they had already lost over half their force. He glanced at the scanners, smiling with relief at the news that Sanctum Guard had pulled the majority of the refugees out of harms way and loaded them into ships, along with the engineers and aid corps personnel.

Even the revelation that he and his surviving forces were now fully surrounded did nothing to dampen his relief at his daughter’s escape, and taking a deep breath, he howled into the comms, and then threw back his head and laughed as he engaged the jump packs again, coming down in the middle of a trio of Esharioc troopers lugging a heavy weapon and beheading the three with one massive sweep before setting the weapon up and starting to fire it on the enemy rapidly advancing towards him. He managed to get off a few hundred shots before the barrel began melting, and he jumped up again, only then realizing that the two men who’d been next to him only moments ago had been shot in their last jump.

“This is our last fight, marines!” he shouted, defiantly as he began firing off his last magazines, before slinging the empty railgun and switching back to his swords. “Show them what it means to corner wolves! Resist and bite!”

Fighting viciously, Jaegar disengaged yet another squad of Esharioc, moving as fast as he could. No longer was the goal to fully destroy them, just to keep as many of them tangled up as he could, to get the last refugees out, to keep the battle going, to make his death count for as much hope to the hegemony and as much misery to the hated invaders as possible. The next skyward jump allowed him to come down from on high and cleave a Crusader from brains to – did they have balls? – The half hysterical thought flitted through his mind as the adrenaline coursed, the blood of his enemies now coating his armor…and he suddenly felt a flash of heat, and then searing pain in his right leg.

He looked down as he fell, and realized the limb had been blown off. He twisted away from the attackers, pulling his pistol and then engaging the jump pack to fling himself forward, impaling another crusader before rolling away, swearing at the pain. Another opponent raised a shockblade – this one an axe – and severed his other leg at the knee even as he crawled away, firing his pistol into that attacker’s head.

He got the message from the Sanctum Guard that the evacuation was complete, that the surviving wolves could withdraw, and Jaegar laughed as he looked at who was left via the displays on his HUD. Barely two regiments remained, though they’d mauled the Esharioc ground troops, and badly.

And there was no making it out of this for him. He fired a few more shots from the pistol as more Esharioc drew closer, dragging himself to a railgun and starting to fire it as they closed. Then he keyed the LENS transmitter in his suit, the one designed to send a dying soldier’s final transmission.

“Jessie,” He gasped, through the pain as the railgun thrummed and another enemy fell. “I just want you to know that I am so, so proud of you. I know growing up wasn’t always easy, and now I just want to say that I’m so, so sorry I –“ A crimson flash of pain made him grit his teeth over a scream as the railgun clocked out. Not that it mattered, a moment later he found his left arm blown off at the elbow as he switched to his sidearm once more. “-sorry I couldn’t always have been there with you. Tell your mom that she was right. The military was the death of me. But Jessie –“ he paused, knowing he shouldn’t, knowing he didn’t have time, needing to get this right anyway as he slammed his last pistol magazine in. “I love you, and I am so, so sorry I won’t be able to see what the galaxy looks like when you’re done changing it. I wish I could have seen it, but I am so proud of you, and even know, the stars look a little brighter knowing you’re going to make it out. Knowing that you’ll still be here. I just…fuck, they really got me this time…I just want you to know that I love you, and that I am so proud of you, Jessie. I love you and I wish I could have seen what you’ll do next. But I can’t let these things come near you. Making sure you got out safe…” He said, throwing one of the hand-activated rocket grenades and directing it towards an enemy tank, “It was worth not coming home for. I love you, Jessie. Good luck, from your dad.” He started crying as he drew the vibroblade, his pistol having run dry as he rolled and slashed the ankles of the first Esharioc to come near and slit its throat. “Even after I made flag rank, just being your dad was the thing I was proudest of. I love you, Jessie, good luck.” He ended the transmission, and smiled at the Crusader standing triumphantly over him. “What are you waiting for, asshole?” He snarled, defiant to the last.

The last thought that went through his head as he raised his sword and plunged it through the monster’s heart even as the gravity hammer descended and shattered him was that he’d won. He’d gotten his daughter and all those refugees out alive. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quote in german is "It's not a battle, it's a rescue operation" and was what was said by the commander of the German 12th Infantry before they sacrificed themselves to the last man holding open a corridor of egress to get 250,000 civilians out ahead of what would later be known as the Rape of Berlin, if you were curious as to the historical reference.


	23. Breach

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bastion falls

The defending fleet in orbit of Bastion was driven back, slowly, and following the death of General Graador the Esharioc ground assault had consisted of a bare handful of assaults at the positions of the Guard, which were repelled quickly and bloodily.

And yet the Guard commander couldn’t quite let go a feeling of nervousness.

***

Their Sanctity, the Imperator of the Esharioc, had sent a message to the commander in the penultimate Oblivion Seal. “We have attempted long enough to break through the defense in the Bastion system, and with the death of Graador, we no longer have any chance of overcoming the defenders by main force. That one was Our most favored and skilled ground commander, and it is time to acknowledge that with his demise, the campaign will founder and fail if not pressed forward. It would have been preferable to seize control of the system, perhaps reverse its interdiction field, but We have come to realize there is no time for such a luxury. The Crusade of Survival has been halted long enough.” The Seal commander shuddered at the Imperator’s words, knowing what would come next, claws twitching eagerly to throw the switch.

“Use the Seal.”

***

The lowly Esharioc commander on the ground of Bastion received the message to carry forward the heaviest artillery they possessed and guard it with their lives long enough to fire into the ships now docked on-planet. The lieutenant shuddered, knowing what that meant, but feeling a strange sense of pride in the trust being placed in it. They were to doom several hundreds of millions of millions of enemy defenders and ensure the deaths of so many Esharioc were not in vain, and at the cost of only the quarter million lives remaining.

It raised its shocksword and pushed the soldiers forward, lugging the artillery, and even as the railgun rounds and plasma fire of the Guard tore into them, they marched on, singing the battle hymn and pleading with their god to take them gently. Even as they were slaughtered, they got just enough of their shells off to destroy the enemy transport ships.

The Guard soldiers could only look at each other, baffled at the strange, sacrificial assault that had occurred, wondering what the point had been…until the screamers that had remained undetected at the edge of the system started sending a transmission of a new enemy arriving.

***

Far above orbit, as the Seal entered the system, the priest that had come with it read from the book of judgement. “At the orders of our Hallowed Imperator, and by the Grace of the god who speaks through them, the all-mighty and holy Zenitan, I hereby place upon the world of Bastion and those currently drawing breath upon it the Seal of Oblivion, and thereby sign the death warrant of a world, consigning its defenders and all of the People seeking to siege it to Zenitan’s mercy. May the god carry his people into the peace of the afterlife with a gentle hand, punish the servants of the Abomination, but provide succor, healing and mercy to those who found themselves enslaved by it by no choice of their own, to be rescued in holy balefire.” The prayer concluded, the priest threw the switch.

***

For the Guard, who were now transmitting, the world erupted into confusion as they desperately sent home a transmission, one that revealed to the casual observer for the first time that the Esharioc had a weapon capable of destroying planets.

“The Esharioc moved forward to attack the transports. We finally cleared the area, all of the Esharioc troops on Bastion are dead, but we can’t retreat now. New ship just arrived in the system. Huge, looks like some kind of ring with a long cannon in the center. It’s…what the fuck? There’s a giant…pillar of fucking flame out there, I’m not sure what’s going on but…”

Then their world flashed to fire, and the transmission was cut off as abruptly as their lives.

***

To the Priest in the Seal, the vision of the annihilation inflicted was one of Euphoria. What did it matter how powerful the servants of the Abomination were? What matter their prowess of battle, or the horror of their condition? The People had the ability to set their very skies ablaze and burn the cores out of their worlds, boring through to the core and superheating it until it sublimated, until the planet as a whole exploded, leaving only gas and burning slag where once a world had been, hovering as though space itself was cradling the ruins of a world it no longer embraced.

***

“We can now confirm that the fortress world of Bastion has in fact been destroyed by an Esharioc superweapon previously unknown to the general public. The enemy fleet is moving Coreward as we speak. While the military is still attempting to figure out if any Guard units made it out, the death toll is in the millions.” The newscaster’s voice was stunned with shock and sounded dead, mechanical, as he read off the report. “Gods help us all, they have a world-killer…”

***

President Maria Gonzalez of the Terran Republic, Matriarch Elian of the Nathian Tribal Federation, Speaker Clinios of the Palnt Collective, High Cleric Imdi of the Galri Theocracy, Archon Perinoc of the Ivari, Minister Altanin of the Epomi, Union Chief Bortovn of the Dembra, Emperor Terion e’Klae of the Keldebriar, Executive Aliphas Blorgi of the Vulpexi Consortium, Andionx, the new Chieftain-General of the Tyrisians, the Watcher of the Tenebrae, and the assorted leaders of the Ambrin Confederacy discussed the aftermath of the destruction of Bastion. Within hours, a resolution that their initial refusal to surrender had been correct was reached and sent to the people of the Hegemony.

And with it, something else.

“The Esharioc can bring all the mighty weapons they want. The Hegemony will still stand when this war comes to a close. The Kilick Swarms once attempted to devour all other life, and the Dominion and Keldebrair contained them, for humans to destroy them centuries later. The Dominion once declared war on its neighbors, but it was brought down, and rebuilt from the ground up by the best among its people, into an honorable organization of merchants who seek to improve the fortunes of everyone. Kyriion, a sapient plague so powerful and deadly that these invaders mistook it – understandably – for a dark god, attempted and failed to destroy this galaxy, and it failed, life remains. The Synthor attempted to annihilate all sapient life, and their servo-cores and machines were scattered into space, but life still stands. When the Esharioc have been driven out and their foul faith crushed, the Hegemony will stand. Our peoples, and all those who have not yet discovered space travel, all life in this galaxy will still exist. The invasion will be halted, and when they have fallen, the life in this galaxy, and the Hegemony of Free Worlds formed here, will still stand.”

***

On the Esharioc’s capitol world, Nex’arra listened to the speeches made by the enemy leaders and watched their courage in naming the Abomination, mocking the Esharioc fear of it. And yet, they were unbroken. Nex’arra reflected on the nerve of the heretics, but resolved to see it through. With the exception of the Galri, whose pacifistic worship of life, all life, marked them as fools, none of them had some unifying god to shield them from the Abomination, and soon, they would be destroyed by the People.

****

Morale among the Hegemony took a hit after the destruction of Bastion, realizing that the valor, heroism, and the carnage on that planet had been for naught. However, others pointed out that the Battle of Bastion had horribly mauled the Esharioc surface warfare forces, and that the time it had bought them had allowed millions more Guard troopers and thousands more ships to be built, trained, and equipped. Further, Bastion became a symbol for the resilience of both Guard forces and of the Hegemony’s resolve. After all, this morale campaign pointed out, the planet had broke before its defenders had. 


	24. Heartbreak Back Home

Jessie Jaegar stared at the bulkhead of the Aid Corps ship where she’d been sitting since the evacuation of Bastion over three weeks prior. The rest of the engineers had landed on Haven, but she’d been forcing herself to focus on the work of keeping the High Charity running properly, until the actual ship’s engineer had taken pity on her and allowed her to stay on. She couldn’t get the images of her father’s unit being swamped in Esharioc troops, the feeling of elation she’d had when he’d shown up leaving her now wracked with sobs when she replayed his final transmission, over and over.

Her father, Major General Hann Jaegar, the man who’d spent so much of his life fighting off planet against every horrible thing humanity had come up against, but who’d never failed to come home whenever he had time. Who’d carved out time to take her to the Galri and get her the genetic modification her body needed to feel right. Who’d cheered her on at every science fair she’d ever attended, even the ones where he had to call in right before a battle.

Major General Hann Jaegar, the invincible hero of the Terran Republic’s ground forces, the Wolf Division Marines who’d spearheaded every major surface campaign the Republic had fought. Her father, her invincible father.

Dead. The world he’d fought on, destroyed. And he’d sacrificed his life to get her and the other refugees, engineers, Aid Corps, and Sanctum Guard off of Bastion. “I can’t believe it was for nothing.” The words just fell out as she started crying again. He’d died fighting an impossible battle, the way she was always afraid he would, but never in a million years did she expect his last battle to be in a failed campaign. That wasn’t like him. Maybe he had gotten out. Maybe…

She was crying too loudly to hear the quiet steps of the Nathian, Dalafer, behind her. “Miss?” She turned around, startled, and then relaxed when she saw him. “What?”

“You should know. Your father wouldn’t say it was for nothing. He was fighting to get people out. He was fighting to save you.”

“How do you know?” Jessie’s head hurt from exhaustion, but she felt Dalafer’s paw on her shoulder.

“Because when I was in the Guard, I served with your dad.” Dalafer left out that the Wolf Marine commander had always terrified him. “During the Marauder War. I hated what we were doing, and so did he. But the Sclunter were vicious, and he’d seen them attack civilian transports. After Carsai, right before I mustered out, he said that his whole job was to make the galaxy safe for the people he loved.”

Jessie started crying again, but this time, Dalafer was staying close. “I know it hurts. I lost my whole clan to the Kyriion outbreaks. I promise, it gets better. Family stays with you forever, even if they’re gone. You carry their love with you everywhere you go, even long after they’re gone.”

Dalafer’s voice cracked, thinking back on the brother and sister he’d lost to the outbreak, and to the parents he’d lost to the Dominion. They were still with him, too. He hugged Jessie as he thought about them.

“What were your clan like?”

“Patient, scattered…they were the best people I’d ever met. They cared about everyone, even total strangers. Never saw them turn anyone away.”

Jessie nodded. “My dad was like that, too. Whenever he was home, he always wanted to make sure that he could help me and my friends, or anyone at the school, with anything he could. He always said that being with his family was the most important thing to him. Said he’d always come back.”

Dalafer hugged her. “He’s still with you, in spirit at least. In body…in body he decided that making sure you got away safely was worth not coming home for. I wish I’d had more chances to get to know him. Just –“ Jessie shuddered, and Dalafer fell silent, sitting with the young human woman as the ship continued to scream silently through the spiraling lights of hyperspace.

***

Rudi Ceris was still reeling. His older brother had been on Bastion when the Seal had hit. Marcus, his indestructible big brother, had been lost when Bastion had been destroyed. Not cut off or wiped out with Jaegar’s counter-assault, he’d been one of the wolves who’d held with the Guard during the following battles, only to be evaporated by the Oblivion Seals. “My brother is gone…”

Endirmas Blorgi was standing next to him. “My cousin, too. Brimas died above Bastion. I’m…still struggling with it. My research indicates that humans like talking about positive memories of the deceased with friends when they’ve a lost loved one. Should we swap stories?” Rudi couldn’t help but chuckle. The other scholar, even Vulpexi, had a lot in common with him.

“I remember when the colony we grew up on came under attack from the Dominion, way way back, and Marcus…he was only fifteen or so, I was twelve…and he found a gun during the attack, took down a dozen Kilicks while they were charging us. He helped me hide, and kept me safe. I just…I can’t believe he actually fell.”

Endirmas winced. “Kilicks frightened me too. I was a scholar, but for the longest time, I wasn’t allowed to study other beings’ cultures. Dominion wouldn’t let me. Brimas kept breaking encryptions – high grade, Dominion-government encryptions – to get me more data about other species. In many ways, it was thanks to her that I got so interested in your species. I learned so much because of her, and…”

Rudi glanced at him. “She’s why your people wound up getting closer to ours. Hell, I only made it to college because my brother protected me that day. Those Kilicks would have eaten us both. I just…I look around and can’t imagine what I’d have been without him, if I wasn’t bug-food.”

“I don’t know what the Dominion would have become if Brimas hadn’t helped me learn as much as I did. I wouldn’t have known enough to be taken seriously as a candidate for the Consortium’s leadership, and certainly wouldn’t have known enough to make peace successfully.” Endirmas’s skin was quivering. He couldn’t believe that Brimas had died, after all she’d helped him learn, after all the difference she’d made, she’d died on a battlefield, even though she wasn’t a warrior. She’d wanted to help the others, and she’d mauled the incoming Esharioc fleet, added tens of thousands of enemy casualties by running the orbital defenses.

“I just…can’t believe they’re gone.”

****

Namna was enjoying a moment of leave back on Tildas II, while Jake and Callie were off with Tiger Squadron, having taken their orders to prepare to take part in the naval counter-strike against the Esharioc invasion before the horrific world-killer could arrive at Haven.

Tony and Alicia were with her, and Namna was hugging them. Both of the kids were running around, still playing with the tribe’s other kids. But they seemed nervous. They knew their parents would be going off into battle, and the war had remained so intense that the Andala parents had only been able to visit once.

Still, they were about to be able to do a holo-call via the LENS network. The communication system activated, and Jake and Callie Andala stood before their children in their uniforms, fully and perfectly rendered by the hologram. “Tony, Alicia, you’re looking well.”

Alicia spoke, tearing up at the sight of her parents, stopping Tony from trying to hug the holograms. He hadn’t quite realized yet that they weren’t physical. “Hi, Mom, Dad. We’re doing okay here, but we miss you. When are you coming back?”

“Soon, I hope. We need to finish the fight, though. The Esharioc unveiled some new tricks and…it’s getting scary.”

Alicia started crying. She knew that the destruction of Bastion had happened – that had been all over the newscasts for a week now – but to know that her two-of-a-kind, unstoppable ace parents were terrified…it was too much. Jake visibly attempted not to swear as he realized his mistake in saying that. “Hey, it’ll be okay. We’ll come back. We promised, remember? We’re not going to die. We’ll come home as soon as we can.” The Andalas, and their Nathian sister, talked for a time, trying to soothe their children’s fears as Namna held the kids, trying to help calm their own nerves as they prepared to hang up and have to go fight their most dangerous battle since the Kyriion crisis.

After the call had ended, Alicia and Tony were left crying, hoping that their parents would be alright, while huddling in Namna’s arms and leaving the Nathian thinking that her brother and sister needed to make it home. That they weren’t allowed to die after all this.  _ You survived Kyriion, and everything else. You have to come home, be with your kids. You’re human, I know but you’re Nathian too, and you need to be here for your family as soon as you can. _

***

Adisa was calling her parents. They were elderly. She’d never had any husband or wife, and it’d been years since that one drunken fling she, and Jaegar had had right after Jaegar’s divorce. She still couldn’t believe that he’d managed to die. The two of them and Shiloh Hendrix had had a tontine going after that night, the three most experienced officers of the Terran Republic. Though the original Captain Shen and the old Russian had joined in later. Given the intelligence she’d gathered on the Esharioc Imperium’s defenses, those that would be around the Imperator…she realized that at this point, with her and Shiloh Hendrix being all that was left…

“Damn Brit is going to wind up winning. Heh. She’s earned it. Lionhearted old bitch. Hope you get to retire at least, Shiloh.” Adisa had called a few young soldiers she’d trained, Viper operatives who were still bogged down in the insurgency on Ghenkl, encouraging them, and then called her sister. “Lupita.”

“Adisa. It’s good to hear from you again.”

“It is.” Adisa choked up, struggling to find her voice. Her sister deserved to know ahead of time, if nothing else. “I have another mission.”

Lupita winced. “There’s more to it than that this time, isn’t there?”

“It’s an assassination, so not more in that sense, no. I can’t tell you who the target is, for security reasons. But…Lupi I’m fucking terrified. The thing is, I looked at every inch of the plan and…I need to do this but this is my last mission. I’m not coming back. It’s a one-way raid.”

She could hear her sister flinch on the other end. “I can’t talk you out of it, can I?”

“No. No, I’m afraid not.”

Lupita’s voice was choked, but she croaked out. “I love you, sister. I love you.”

Adisa’s heart clenched, and she whispered, “I love you too. Tell your kids…Tell your kids their aunt loves them. I already told mom and dad, so you don’t need to worry about doing that for me. I promise, though. I’ll make it count.”


	25. A Gift From Terra

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Esharioc Imperator is attacked, and the Esharioc's unhealthy obsession with martyrdom comes to bite them

_ Before all else, as you read this record of these moments, remember that Adisa and her crew were friends of mine. And that it is of utmost importance, both historically and to me, personally, that this incident and how much difference it made are remembered until the stars go dark. - Endirmas Blorgi. _

Adisa could feel her heart pounding in her chest, and cherished the feeling, knowing it wouldn’t be doing that for much longer. She’d left instructions for the other Viper teams, plans for what to do should she be able to return, but it was at this point pretty well accepted that she wasn’t coming back. Prian had said the same thing when he had gripped her hand in his paw, and Shaed had sworn to accompany them both on this singular mission. Two other Vipers, two Keldebriar Hunters, and two Tenebrae assassins were accompanying them. She’d studied the notes the Hegemony had on the Esharioc genome, and realized that no synthesized poison would prove fatal to them.

So she’d brought her own mix. Dozens of venoms, mixed into an ointment that allowed them to stay “live” while maintaining all their original effects. The gifts of Earth’s most deadly species. Asp, Mamba, Cobra, Bushmaster, Pufferfish, Sea Wasp, Cone Snail. Any of these were quickly lethal, and they were a handful among dozens. Adisa was bringing them all on her knives as a last resort weapon.

It had been accepted that this was a one-way mission, with an all-volunteer team. Those who either had no families or who’d lost them to the war were the only ones accepted. The Imperator of the Esharioc would die today. The Keldebriar primarch legion had agreed to launch raids on several occupied worlds to cause chaos, but the keystone of the attack would be her assassination of the enemy leader. If they did, given what intelligence had determined about the nature of the Esharioc’s beliefs, the death of the Imperator would shatter their will and bring their war to a close. Even if the team didn’t survive the aftermath, that made the whole thing worth it, to end the appalling losses of life.

And yet, at the end of her over sixty-three-year life and over forty-year career as one of Terra’s premiere special operatives, she still had fight left in her. I don’t want to die. But if that’s the price to end the war…it’s worth it. She’d sworn an oath, after all. To uphold and defend the rights of all sapient life, no matter the cost.

And this whole operation had been her idea. Prian had accepted it as an honor, as had Shaed. Even the hardened contract killer had developed a sense of comradery with her and the being she jokingly referred to as a samurai cat. But now…

Now they were about to embark on their last mission together.

***

They were inserted in a stealth ship, piloted by Ritia, who had shed much of her once-magnificent plumage in grief to see the team go. The group disembarked and saluted farewell, seeking cover, keeping quiet. The Tenebrae kept their chromatophores active, camouflaging them as they crept around, using strange garrotes to silence any Esharioc sentries before they could cry out. Adisa was keeping her own weapon suppressed, but that didn’t mean silent, and as a result she was trying to avoid firing if she didn’t have to. The time to do that would come later, when they were in the throne room. The small team advanced quietly, certainly, ducking into alleyways to avoid the patrols of Esharioc troopers who boarded their massive ships in preparation for the invasion of more worlds. Adisa and Prian were staying close, though. They were able to slip past the Crusader Guards surrounding the palace, along with the rest of the team.

The small Viper team approached the massive fortress of the Imperator. There were a few back entrances, studding the heavily fortified ferrocrete walls. The bulk of the Vipers were hidden, and it was the Tenebrae who took up the task of slithering up the walls and neutralizing the sentries while Adisa crept around and planted the anti-personnel mines that Owens had custom-built before his death on Ghenkl. They’d help hold off pursuing enemies, and no sooner had Shaed’s voice hissed into her ear through the comms, “Sentries cleared.” The team sniper, Slate, began climbing the tower. He was no Doakes, but he was still an expert. He too, would help hold off enemy soldiers coming into the palace to rescue their Imperator.

Shaed slid up to the backdoor and began opening it with a magnetic pick. A handful of Esharioc came around the corner and were immediately downed, before any of them could so much as cry out, by the Keldebrair vaulting forward, blades flashing, to cut away their throats and gills before any sound of alarm could be emitted. The door finally hissed open, with the small team moving in, pausing as they did so to double check that the suppressors on their ripper SMGs and their Lancer pistols were firmly in place. The door was locked behind them, then trapped.

A handful of Esharioc troopers came around the corner and were dropped by the point troopers of the team, two Keldebriar and a human, with a three-round burst apiece. The long, sloping heads of the enemy splattered apart like grapes as the heavy 10mm rounds impacted. Thanks to the suppressors, the shots weren’t as loud as they could be, but contrary to 20th and 21st century films told people of that time, a suppressor did not actually make gunshots silent, and as a result the team was forced to begin moving far faster, before more guards – or gods forbid, those super-strong Crusader assholes – got in the way.

The small team moved quickly, the Tenebrae blending into the walls as another patrol of two guards approached, and before those two got their weapons into position the two Tenebrae appeared behind them and slashed their throats, dropping them as the rest of the team advanced, carefully gunning down the handful more Esharioc soldiers who’d emerged from a guardroom, peeking out momentarily to be cut down without mercy, with short, precise bursts. The team knew this was their last mission, and they were determined to accomplish it. The lack of fear that accompanied the fatalistic determination made their shots precise, unhurried, lethal.

Adisa and Prian were still calm, Shaed slinking beside them as the group continued to move, even as the first trio of crusaders appeared from the next set of doors, exactly as expected. What had been unexpected was that they were clever enough to bring Purging Lances scaled to them and began trading fire with the team, sublimating two of them. That dozens more of them began pouring into the narrow hallway and the only Viper who attempted to throw a grenade found it intercepted before it could actually kill an enemy and instead felt it burst close enough to shred him with shrapnel made it worse. Adisa ducked into cover, along with the rest of her team. That eerie thrum sounded and another of the Tenebrae exploded. Her troops traded shots with the enemy, and Adisa desperately tried to figure out how to turn this around….and saw a dozen normals running up behind them.

The group began firing at the normal Esharioc troopers approaching, rapidly realizing that they were probably going to die…until they realized that Shaed had dropped against a wall and begun vanishing from sight. He seized up a grenade belt with the tentacles that made up his legs, and flickered over towards the heavy brute squad of the Crusaders, unseen, until the moment he pulled the pins from the grenades and began hastening away.

Unfortunately, a spare tentacle brushed one of the Crusaders as he turned, and the cephalopodic being was seized by the massive alien super-soldiers. And Adisa saw it as he decided to thrash as violently as he could to force them to keep their eyes on him instead of the grenades that killed them all…and Shaed himself…mere moments later.

Adisa and Prian shot off the last of the rear-approaching enemies and moved up with the handful of their troops remaining. They forced their way through the doors and gunned down the last of the guards. Then they saw the guard arrayed around the Imperator, and saw three more Vipers slaughtered as Prian and Adisa managed to avoid the attack once again. Now they were the only two left, and the enemy remained unmoving, guarding their dark, massive lord against all others.

Adisa felt Prian’s paw grip her hand. “It has been an honor, Mamba…Adisa.” He said, sadly, hugging the human woman. She buried her face in his fur, enjoying the friendly contact, the last she’d ever experience. They broke the embrace. “Been good serving with you, Prian. A real honor. Let’s make it count.”

The two master fighters released each other and reloaded – then Prian blurred in a burst of motion like nothing Adisa had ever seen, entering the building and firing off his entire sixty-round magazine in quick bursts, dropping the bulk of the enemy guard, as Adisa followed up with her own weapon, until he finally tackled the last few Crusaders, scything through them with his vibroblades until he managed to down the last two…only for the Imperator to step off his throne, experimentally twirling a weapon similar to the Crusaders’ gravity hammers, though it was, in his case, a massive flanged mace.

Adisa took her weapon off of the enemy troopers and emptied her remaining twenty shots into the Imperator, who staggered for a moment but still brought his massive mace down on Prian’s skull. The last pose of defiance Adisa saw her friend strike was a crouch, hissing like a cat and swinging his knives at the Imperators’ wrists, making him howl even as the mace descended.

The force of the strike took the mace from the Imperator’s wounded hand, doused in Prians’ orange blood. Adisa reloaded as the Imperator shook his hand and sprinted to recover his mace, tagging him with a few shots, before she heard something. Something far worse than the unsettling chitter of a Kilick, the bone rattling war-cry of a Sclunter Warboss or the chilling mechanical whine of a Synthor.

The Imperator was laughing. “You have impressed Us, human. A fine display of skill and valor, from you and your fellow plague bearer. But it matters not.” Adisa lit him up. Ten rounds to the stomach. Twelve to the upper chest. Eight to the hips. Five more to each shoulder. Five to each backward-bent knee. The Imperator managed to fall behind a pillar before she could put the rest of the mag in his head, so she emptied it into his torso.

And then got the shock of her life. The wounds were closing. Quickly. She drew her lancer and emptied that magazine as well, desperately trying to convince herself that this hadn’t been for nothing. When it ran empty, the Imperator swung back to its feet, just as she reloaded and emptied all twelve shots into the “sniper’s triangle” the upper chest and head.

It still did not fall.

It even waved one taloned hand in a “move this along” gesture.

She seethed as it threw a fallen weapon and struck the pistol from her hand. An acolyte, the one who’d been beside him the day of the communication with the senate, entered the Throne room, seemingly on signal. “Do it no harm, Nex’arra. We wish to explain, should it be carrying recording equipment. And demonstrate to your peoples that they are wrong, that they may see their error. Watch as Our wounds heal, human. The gift of Zenitan. Granted in birth, in egg, to Us, the mightiest of Progenitor Zenitan’s children, that We may lead their people to survival and victory.” In that moment, Nex’arra gasped and knelt. Adisa’s mind scrambled to figure out how it had survived those headshots, then remembered something that Endirmas had told her about Vulpexi nervous systems, how they didn’t have a singular brain, but multiple nerve nodes spread throughout their bodies, and it stood to reason that the same applied to the Esharioc, if this one, with its horrid regeneration, was still standing.

“One hell of a mutation, invader. I’ll give you that.” She had only one chance. She rushed him, drawing her blades, the poisoned ones, and ducked beneath the massive gravity mace before cutting one of the Imperator’s legs off. It didn’t seem to grow back, and she managed to plant one of the knives into the Imperator’s back, slamming the button that would inject the poisons within the hilt, and left the blade there. The Imperator reeled and swung his mace again, this time losing a hand for its trouble and allowing Adisa to plunge her second knife into its thorax, before it caught the mace in the other hand and shattered her sword arm.

She tried not to scream. The leg wasn’t regrowing but the other wounds were almost healed, even as he swung the mace around and flung her away with shattered hips. It pulled the knives out and cracked its carapace as the wounds began to close, and Adisa, through a red haze of pain, realized her final mission had been in vain. Then the Imperator staggered. “What did you do to Our body, plague witch!?”

Adisa spat blood…apparently some of her hip had gone into her organs…either that or it was bits of her arm, shoulder, and rib. Breathing was agony, but she managed to spit out an ironic, mocking echo of the Imperator’s own words between gasps. “A gift from mother Terra. To let her childrens’ defenders do their jobs better. The bush viper, the cobra, the black mamba, the cotton tail, the asp, sea wasp, recluse, blue-ringed octopus,” she wanted to scream, but she couldn’t stop herself now, “The funnelweb, and so many others. Dozens of poisons from Earth. Survive…” she coughed, “That.” The haze at the edge of her vision was shifting from red to grey as the Imperator slouched, managing to stagger over and raise his mace.

Adisa raised her un-destroyed fist in a last, final show of defiance before the mace came down.

***

Nex’arra stared, horrified at the goings-on, mind working rapidly. The plague bearer, Adisa, had brought with the word of a new god, proven its strength, perishing against a tyrant…just as the prophets of old had done. The Imperator had never been willing to risk itself directly outside of the Unification Wars, and…now it moved to dispose of the bodies of a new prophet, one Nex’arra needed, needed to find out the truth. The Imperator was speaking. “Nex’arra. Witness Our orders to the crew of the final Oblivion Seal.” Their Sanctity activated communications. “Destroy Terra. Destroy Haven. Destroy Tildas II, the world where these miserable slaves of the Abomination first started working together. If We are to perish, We will live to see the will of the Abomination’s children broken.” Nex’arra moved forward, about to tell the priest to belay that, that they needed to know the truth, that it was vital to the People that they learn of this new faith, one that had argued against their own so well…

“Witnessed, Your Sanctity.” Yet their own mind was churning. The Imperator had sworn They were immortal thanks to the god’s gift. They had sworn they were never wrong, that Zenitan gave them clear sight, yet the Plague Bearers had outwitted the People multiple times. They had demonstrated survival…and with the final assassin’s words, revealed to Nex’arra the possibility of another god shielding them. 

Heretical to even think, yet the Imperator had proven to be wrong about much else. They could be wrong about this, and with the Imperator preparing to die before the weapon this other God had granted her children…could Nex’arra deny that their god’s might was real, that it had shielded them?

_ What had the assassin called her god? Mother Terra. The world itself was their god, the Human god. What if… _

_ What if the worlds of all these beings were their gods? What if the life… _

_ Heresy, yet… _

Nex’arra made their decision. They needed to know for sure. They had no other choice. When the Imperator died, they would take the swathes of Esharioc acolytes and civilians who had been entrusted to their guidance and learn the truth. Learn of a new shield against the Abomination. One that didn’t require the deaths of so many. Then Nex’arra turned to the bodies of Prian and Adisa, the prophetic assassins. “Witnessed, new prophets.” Their voice sounded bold, sounded confident, even if inside the priest was shaking. The Imperator had heard it, and cursed them.

“What did you say, cleric?”

“I acknowledged the prophets of a new god. I name you heretic, Imperator. Blasphemer. False prophet. There’s another god out there, one more aligned with Zenitan than your orders. Their people stand against us.”

“You are speaking treason and apostasy, Nex’arra.”

Nex’arra’s decision had already been made. “I am speaking truth. I am speaking the true will of our gods.” They slung the bodies of Adisa and Prian over their shoulders, and smashed the Imperator across the face with their own power mace. “I am leaving. And taking those who trust me to start our new hope, with our new faith. And I’ll be taking the bodies of our new prophets with me, to return to their people when I beg for their forgiveness and wisdom.” Then they turned on their heel and left the dying, wounded demi-god Imperator writhing in impotent hate on their throne behind them.


	26. Memory and Madness

_ I would like it on record that I interviewed over a dozen subjects over the course of my research for this part of the chronicle. While I am given to understand that the events described her are a semi-common phenomenon to humans, it is a fascinating phenomenon, and there is at least some evidence to indicate that their atypical psychology is widely to credit for their meteoric rise to galactic significance. I have collected interviews with people who were familiar with those whose stories I have chosen to highlight in this record, however it is apparent through my research that the phenomenon of hallucination of lost loved ones is an experience that has the potential of occurring in any human experiencing grief. While strange psychological phenomena as part of stages of grief are not unknown to other species, most notably Galri, Nathian, and Keldebriar, however some degree of such phenomena are known in all species. Hallucination of lost loved ones, however, seems to be unique to humanity, a likely origin of many of their myths, and seemed like a worthwhile point to raise in this situation, especially as so many humans reported experiencing this phenomena in the same phase of the war _ . – Endirmas Blorgi

The nights on Ghenkhl III were cold, with chilling mist that sapped the strength of soldiers even through recon armor. The swamps were better for guerrilla fighting than for mainline combat, and thus the arthropodic Esharioc and the human, Keldebriar, and Tenebrae special operators hunted each other in hit-and-run ambushes and harassment, terrorizing one another. The Esharioc obviously wanted to terraform the jungle and swamp world into something more suited to their species, but the Ghenkhl resistance wanted their world back, and they were a Hegemony species. Bombs were planted on the enemy terraforming plants, patrols were ambushed when they went out to exterminate the Ghenkhl people.

Lance Corporal Harriet Stilson of 6th Viper Team was hiding behind one of the local megaflora as she prepared for the ambush, flicking the safety off her carbine and preparing to take the small Esharioc patrol under fire. She had just gotten the news two standard days prior. It hadn’t come down officially, and she wasn’t totally sure it was true, but the founding member of the Viper teams and the woman who had made them a legend, Sgt. Adsia Imari, had been killed in action in an effort – at least possibly successful, to assassinate the Esharioc Imperator. Along with Prian i’Lak, a Keldebriar Hunter who had been to that organization what Adisa was to the Vipers, and Harriet simply couldn’t believe it.

Adisa had been a common presence, a mentor to her after Harriet’s family had been killed during the Kyriion crisis, and taught her everything she needed to know about how to handle herself. Called her as needed over the course of the war, just to check in on her. And now…the immortal Sgt. Imari was gone.

The enemy stepped into view, and out of the corner of her eye, Harriet saw the Tenebrae officer she was working with gesture to engage the patrol. She gently stroked the trigger, sending a bolt of magnetically sheathed ionized gas through the heart of the Esharioc trooper she’d been ordered to target. The target dropped, and the small unit devastated the Esharioc troopers before the enemy were able to target any of them.

Then a grenade landed at her feet, and she only barely managed to dive aside as it detonated, killing the other man who’d been with her. A second Esharioc ambush that had come up from the flank was beginning to devastate the team and all Harriet could do was dive into the brush and start firing.

Then she heard a voice. “Hey, don’t panic. Remember what I taught you. Just take a bead, and keep moving.” The voice was Sgt. Imari’s, even though Adisa couldn’t possibly be there. Out of the corner of Harriet’s eye, she saw her mentor, and she tightened her grip on the weapon. Firing again, slowly, not hurrying herself as she moved to the next tree. She knew no one would ever believe her when she spoke of this moment, but throughout the firefight it felt as though Adisa was watching her back throughout, even as the projectiles continued flying back and forth and the fighting grew ever nastier in the muck and mist of Ghenkhl.

***

Joan was still shuddering under the memory of Bastion as the horrible blade ships of the Esharioc deposited the first waves of their soldiers on Haven itself. Even as the guns pounded down, the fortifications erected by the Dembra and Palnt while the hammering guns began engaging. For a moment, the young soldier seemed to recall the fury of Vasliev and Jaegar, the soldiers who’d fought alongside her, however briefly each time, on Bastion and Aldian, devastating the enemy. Jaegar’s mad laugh, Vasliev’s calm resolved in the face of impossible odds, an implacable enemy and stark terror of imminent death. Firing the railgun as the enemy continued to advance, she could almost swear she could imagine Jaegar descending on his assault armor’s wings of fire.

***

As Andionx descended on the enemy with his massive scything vibrosword and his shredder cannon and began brutally hacking and blasting his way through the Esharioc at the head of the Furies, he roared in hatred. These beings had slain both Adisa and Jaegar, and devasted dozens of worlds, slaughtered billions of sapient beings, and the fury of a Tyrisian warrior would answer them, here on Haven, the world of the united Hegemony. They were still attacking the unarmed, and the lack of honor inherent in that made him absolutely livid, and it was with that, and the memory of his comrades in mind, that he began absolutely ripping the enemy to quivering shreds, driving them away under a curtain of plunging fire by the Guard in the bunkers.

***

Jake and Callie were speeding into the enemy fleet escorting the final Oblivion Seal, the monstrous weapon of war that had been used to destroy Bastion. The forces of the Hegemony were attempting to break through the swarms of the Esharioc ships escorting the massive Oblivion Seal to the next world it intended to destroy such that it would be subject to attack and destruction before it could destroy another planet.

Even as they passed through the hail of fire delivered by the enemy forces and delivered antimatter torpedoes to damage or destroy the larger ships while employing their lighter weaponry against the common fighters, rapidly spiraling through space. The Ivari was kicking ass, and neither Jake nor Callie could help but come to revel in watching their view of the Ivari from before they’d met Ywyn – that they were a species of isolationists completely lacking in the nerve that humanity so spectacularly presented – be completely and utterly destroyed by the fiery personality of the ace pilot, whose skill came at least in part from being conditioned to think in three dimensions from infancy, being of a flying species to begin with.

Even as the devastation carried forward, starting to break apart the enemy onslaught, Amelia’s voice on the comms, as she began calling out orders, began sounding like the original Alicia, which shook the two experienced pilots, only for a moment.  _ One more time, one more war. Once we’re done, old friend, we’ll be going home to the children we named for you. _

***

Lee Shen, the son of Captain Shen of the original Rhino tanks, and current Lieutenant in the Aid Corps, was working on caring medically for some of the wounded soldiers in the battle above ground. As he worked, he thought for a moment about his father, wondering if he’d chosen the correct path after all. Maybe he should have followed his father’s footsteps of more actively fighting instead…He worked on the wound, rapidly removing the slivers of shrapnel in the abdomen of a young Guard trooper, one who had merely enlisted a few months ago. As Shen began injecting regenor drugs and stitching closed the exterior wounds to allow the drug do to its work more effectively, he thought for a moment he saw his father out of the corner of his eye, smiling and nodding as his son worked to save the life of a wounded man.

Shen shuddered at the wounds he saw on the next trooper, but could still feel that reassuring presence over his shoulder, encouraging him to carry on the work he was doing, hoping that if he could get these burns treated and this horrible wound from the microwaving blast of an enemy purging lance, the young man he saw on the operating table would be able to experience a complete life after the war ended. Hopefully the man would be able to do what he had done after the death of his father, forge friendships with whatever remained of the enemy civilization, if at all possible, and carry a better legacy forward into the future.

***

Jessie Jaegar was rapidly jury-rigging the automated guns together to help cover a larger area with their bombardments. As she looked out over the battlefield through the transparisteel view port, she saw a small formation of assault troopers engaging in a counter-attack, and for only a moment, in the light of the setting sun and above the flame of the jetpacks and the flashes of weapons fire on the battlefield, their armor seemed to match Wolf Division’s colors.

A moment later, she finished getting the guns laid in, the troopers falling back under the cover that the artillery fire provided. “Yeah, those ones get to go home.”

***

On Terra, Lupita Imari was still dealing with the loss of her sister. She was in her childhood home, and every now and again she heard footsteps, ones she just knew matched the rhythm of movement that Adisa had always had, but whenever she looked she only saw their aging parents. To herself she whispered, “Sis…I just can’t believe you’re gone.”


	27. The Lion and the Shield

Shiloh Hendrix watched the flashes of distant guns as her own ship’s weaponry sent metric tons of tungsten, terawatts of coherent light and megaliters of ionized gas hurtling towards the Esharioc fleet, causing catastrophic damage as the rest of Lion Fleet swirled through the cold void, evading and firing in turn, or taking it on the shields as the lethal war of maneuver and will continued unabated in the desperate attempt to stop the Esharioc’s final world-killing weapon from destroying Haven. The monstrous super-weapon had struck at the worlds immediately in from Bastion, destroying two of them. The death toll was estimated in the billions.

General Jaegar had killed their ground force commander. Adisa had, supposedly, assassinated their Imperator. The Admiral she’d gotten reports of and had sparred with several times throughout the war was clearly missing from this battlefield. He was a master at this kind of fight and thus far the mad priest driving the Oblivion Seal’s main tactic had been to gather more reinforcements from Esharioc space, even if it meant leaving those sectors open to raids by the Wraith Bomber Squadron.

But if your Imperator is dead, your army leadership mauled, your ground forces devastated by Bastion, how the bloody FUCK are you still calling up this many sodding ships, you miserable alien cunts? I’m eighty-three years old, I want to retire.

The enemy attempted to get a handful of destroyers in closer until Imperial Shield of the Keldebriar managed to flank the enemy detachment from underneath and blast away at the bellies of the ships until the hulls came apart. The enemy craft was approaching Haven fast, and Shiloh ordered a wing of corvettes in from a 45 degree angle down and left of the Seal, with orders to attempt to cut off their missile frigates and destroy them. Then, realizing a quick chance she had, she ordered her own Bravo missile frigate detachment to set up a bombardment with voidburst detonation in a useful location on her left flank, stopping the enemy’s attempt at a flanking maneuver and allowing her cruiser and corvette detachments to devastate the enemy ships who’d attempted to do so.

Smiling at the devastation and grinning further when her opposite in the Keldebriar’s Imperial Shield fleet followed up her own aggression by plunging in in a cross-hatched and perfectly co-ordinated blitz assault that destroyed dozens of enemy cruisers and managed to finish off one of the dreadnaughts that Tiger Squadron had crippled earlier in the fray. With a vindictive grin she noted that her XO, Silvanus, had plotted a firing solution for her Delta destroyer detachment and ordered them to follow it with their heavier kinetic weaponry, allowing a few more enemy cruisers to be destroyed, even as a few of the destroyers were picked off.

A few hundred more good spacers sent to their deaths to stop these monsters. In the best of times, doing such a thing would have upset her, but after years of war she knew she’d become hardened to the nightmarish reality of war. When a spacer or soldier put on a uniform, they signed over their life to defending the rights of sapient beings, even if it meant death. Shiloh knew that, had in fact, ordered any ship withdrawing from this battle without orders to be destroyed. The situation was desperate, and if the enemy couldn’t be halted, Haven, with all thirteen billion people on it, would soon be consumed in the nightmarish fire that the Oblivion Seal could unleash. Still, at this point, Shiloh was keenly aware that every maneuver she ordered had the potential to deny someone a brother, sister, son, daughter, husband, wife, partner, friend, father, mother…

“Battleship component, split into four elements of equal portions, as well as dreadnaughts. Flank the enemy on all four cardinal directions and begin grinding inward. Destroyers, cruisers, I am about to strike the forward element of the enemy fleet. Corvettes, attack pattern Macedon, then support the destroyers and switch to Taffy-3 assault. Fighter squadrons, attempt to cripple the enemy heavy guns to limit how much damage they can do. Don’t bother trying to destroy them, just hamstring their firepower and let the heavy-hitters do the rest. We still need to break through to the core of this fleet before that world-killer gets in range of Haven.”

The Imperial shield Fleet had circled back around and now struck the enemy in a mirroring maneuver to her own, but from the other direction, temporarily scattering the swarming ships around the Oblivion Seal and sewing nigh-perfect chaos throughout the enemy formations, even as yet more Esharioc ships warped into the system and found the Keldebriar waiting for them, it was rapidly becoming apparent that the combined elite naval forces of the Hegemony had gained an upper hand.

Before Shiloh had had a chance to begin pressing said advantage and driving these murdering xenomorph freaks out of Hegemony space, however, her hopes were quickly and ruthlessly dashed. At the outer edge of the system, speeding rapidly in, was the main armada of the Esharioc fleet. At half again its full strength, and at the head of it, as the viewscreen displayed, was the flagship of Esharioc Admiral Tusaroth.

Rear Admiral Shiloh Hendrix of the Hegemony and Terran Republic wasn’t about to surrender. Neither were the Keldebriar. But that one’s arrival, with that enemy’s actual tactical sense coupled with the already unfortunate numerical disadvantage, had tipped the battle from being barely in the Hegemony’s favor to being brutally against it. “Tiger Squadron,” came a voice from the comms, “FANGS OUT!”

Shiloh laughed lightly and continued her maneuvering, pushing the main force of her fleet into a frontal blitz alongside the Keldebriar, even as the two master squadrons of the Hegemony plunged headlong into the fray, evading the enemy units while devastating the Esharioc fighter component, racing in to cripple their heavier guns before darting out and re-engaging the enemy fighters, occasionally gathering the nerve to group into threes and destroy the bladed and hateful forms of the Esharioc corvettes and destroyers before zipping in and out to engage Tusaroth’s fleet.

Unfortunately for Shiloh, Tusaroth was not the fool that the Priest running the Oblivion Seal was. The Admiral moved its destroyers in a daring pincer stroke to intercept one of the battleship groups preparing to outflank the escort fleet of the Oblivion Seal, and it was only thanks to the daring of the Keldebriar’s pouncing counter-thrust that the other three managed to successfully outflank the enemy, tens of thousands of spacers and hundreds of ships being destroyed on all sides. Once the outer wings of the enemy positions had been destroyed by her flanking maneuver, Hendrix ordered them to egress and engage in a series of strikes, alongside her corvette and missile frigate components, against the fresh arrival by Tusaroth’s fleet, alongside Imperial shield, whilst she, the destroyers and cruisers attacked the heart of the enemy fleet in a desperate effort to destroy the Oblivion Seal.

The reinforcing Esharioc fleet was rapidly coming to surround the elements Shiloh had sent to attack them, however said ships were driving into their hearts with the support of their opposites from Imperial Shield and grinding away at the enemy heavy ships, even as the Esharioc fleets moved to counter them, both Tiger and Apex Squadrons streaking in to damage the enemy dreadnought and battleship guns and teamed to begin breaking up the enemy destroyers to hamstring the counterattack.

Shiloh’s counterthrust began firing on multiple fronts, her destroyers beginning to cut into their battleships as the guns of the Nemean opened up and began shredding their cruisers. The enemy commander was clever, but she’d noticed that Tusaroth was remarkably bad at adapting to multi-front combat, and…

The comms hissed, and a voice Hendrix knew came through. It was the Terran Republic’s Star Marshall. The officer who she had defied to save Jake and Callie during the Kyriion Crisis. She’d never quite forgiven Hendrix for publicly making her look stupid all those years ago, but now her voice was tinged with desperation.

“Admiral Hendrix. Reinforcements in the form of the remnants of Second, Fourth, and First Armadas will soon be arriving. They’re in bad shape, barely over a single full armada between them. Tusaroth cut a bloody swathe through ‘em on his way to reinforce the Oblivion Seal. Once they arrive, they have orders to follow your commands. Save Haven, Admiral. It’s up to you. The rest of the fleet won’t arrive in time. Billions of lives are in your hands.”

Hendrix’s face cracked in another smile, and she began fitting the pieces together. Given what she realized, she couldn’t resist one last shot. “Yes ma’am. You know how I get about guaranteeing the survival of those under my protection.”

Lion Fleet’s assault had carried it well into the heart of the enemy fleet, and it was there that the Nemean’s guns managed their fullest effect, firing in almost every direction, the firing plans plotted in exact co-ordination with their own fleets’ movements to avoid any friendly fire. The Keldebriar’s counterstrike zipped in and began blasting through the fleet around the Oblivion Seal, even as Tusaroth rapidly attempted to counter the attack, his own fleet finally closing the distance between the two battles in the system.

The battle came to a fever pitch. Lasers, plasma, wavesurgers, kinetic projectiles and torpedoes all came into play to devastating effect. Shiloh snarled her orders as the battle see-sawed, the heavy fleets clashing and seeking to gain the advantage as that hateful superweapon grew ever closer to the world of Haven, preparing to snuff out thirteen billion lives in one fell attack. The reinforcing fleet arrived and attacked Tusaroth’s rear echelon, catching up with the hateful Esharioc admiral and beginning to shred the onslaught of his fleet under Shiloh’s direction, with the backup of both her forces and Imperial Shield.

The she realized what Tusaroth had done. He’d managed to drive a wedge between her forces and the Seal…and the superweapon was almost in firing position. “Nemean, prepare for interception plan, Tiger Squadron, Apex, prepare to support. Emperor’s Pride, we’re going to need you for this too. All other ships, engage Tusaroth and attempt to delay him.”

Hendrix’s ship pushed heavy charge into its’ shields and jumped to hyperspace in front of the enemy fleet, knowing that her own shields would disintegrate the mass shadows of anything she hit short of a dreadnought on that charge…at the expense of almost certainly draining the hell out of her engines.

The Nemean halted, immediately in front of the core barrel of the Oblivion Seal, right alongside the Emperor’s Pride. “All non-essential personnel, activate full shields, fire all weaponry straight down this monster’s throat. Clock out every gun we have, then evacuate. Tiger Squadron, Star Apex, escort the escapees to Haven. I have one more trick up my sleeve.”

The guns of the Nemean unleashed absolute devastation down the barrel of the Oblivion seal, the largest and most heavily built of the three, with armor and shielding added to the core to avoid destruction in the style of the previous two, clearly a modification made between the initial raid and this monster’s deployment. Even as the hellish light began emerging at the back of the enemy’s superweapon, indicating the charge was beginning, the dedication of the Nemean’s crew was undimmed, and they, along with the crew of the Emperor’s Pride, were tearing into the enemy superweapon, disdaining the enemy blazing away all around them.

“Personnel, evacuate now!”

The torpedoes were gone and none of the other weapons were making a dent, and as the last of her crew evacuated and she saw Tusaroth finally beginning to lose ground amidst the plan she and Silvanus had worked out, the aged Brit let herself indulge one last laugh. Then she fired off what was left of the weaponry’s assorted ammunition and battery before finally positioning her ship, now that she’d finally damaged out the forward defenses of the weapon the Keldebriar’s weaponry was having some effect. She watched as Tiger Squadron and Star Apex let the crew escape, and was hailed by the Keldebriar Admiral in charge of Imperial Shield.

“It will be able to get a shot off before I can do what can be done to destroy it. If both sets of weaponry are gone, there’s one more trick we can attempt. It will cost the both of us our lives.”

Hendrix chuckled. “Yeah. Yeah it will. Bloody hell,” she said, slumping in her command chair, now that the ship had been evacuated, she felt strangely lonely. Her cat jumped into her lap. The poor thing was old now, ancient. It nuzzled her, and she stroked it. Shiloh choked up a bit as she saw what the Keldebrair was driving at. Her engines were gone from the desperate charge she’d led to get here, but her shields still functioned. “I can move all power to the shields and try to block the shot. It should dissipate the power enough to absorb the initial blast before the second surge goes through. In the interim, will you punch to warp and blow the back out of this fucker?”

“Our minds thought the same. It will be an honor to perish beside you. May our peoples’ history recall us.”

Shiloh let herself have one last laugh as the hexagonal shields blazed to life all around the ship, even as the baleful light finally took on a nuclear tone and enveloped the shields. The screamers of her ship began alerting her that there was no way the shields could sustain it, that the systems would be overloaded, that the reactor would fail if maneuver wasn’t taken to avoid the beam, and Hendrix only moved the ship closer, holding her ancient cat as the blasting continued, the old kitty seeming to realize that this was the last act either of them would take, him or the old warrior woman who had had him from kittenhood. “Yeah, Tibbs. Let’s hope they remember this one. Us…and your interstellar cousin.” The fixtures began erupting, but the light around them was dimming, even as the bulkhead started glowing around her. “Fucking…not done. You want to make humans quit? My breed especially? Try harder than this. Glow worm, Malta, bombing of Britain, Rhodesian SAS…come and get some. We’re not going anywhere.”

The Nemean shuddered, and the engine began roaring like the invincible lion from which the craft had taken its name, and Shiloh held her cat, speaking to her old friend. “Let’s show these alien monsters just what the old bitch can do.” The Keldebriar craft punched to warp just as the systems finally failed around her, instantly destroying the heroic Admiral, her cat…

And the Keldebriar flagship’s attack had destroyed itself to guarantee that her death hadn’t been in vain.

***

The Esharioc priest had laughed when the singular, hated human ship had positioned itself between the target world and his weapon, and yet it remained there as the initial beam had gone off, halting it through what had to have been incredible shielding, forcing him to attempt to charge the initial phase of the planet-destruction process again…But now the ship was gone, erased by the might of Zenitan’s balefire and light.

Then the world for the priest became a blur of actinic fire and an unbelievably loud detonation as the Emperor’s Pride hit it.

***

On Haven, people cheered as they watched the final Oblivion Seal destroyed, even knowing that the legions of Esharioc troops continuing to land imperiled them, the world would not be destroyed. They would be able to fight to survive, not doomed by the judgement of a god none of them trusted via a destruction that they had no defense against. Mourning would come later, when they learned who had died to stop the strike.

***

Tusaroth saw the last Oblivion Seal be shattered. He had managed to rip through the enemy re-enforcing fleets for the most part but what remained of them now had him at a serious disadvantage, and seeking to avoid his own death in the face of the hatred of the Abomination’s mad slaves, his flagship withdrew. There would be a final world destroyed. On board were a handful of weapons, similar to the enemy’s nova bombs, but far more powerful. They would ignite an atmosphere. Anything underground in a sealed bunker would survive to be evacuated, but anything on a planet not sheltered would perish.

He warped towards the system where the Abomination’s deadliest servants had first contacted the rest of them. Tildas II, where this miserable Hegemony had first been forged, would burn, if the People’s Crusade must truly fail, it would take that to the screaming Oblivion that awaited the damned, at least.

His allies stayed behind to hold off any pursuit. And for the most part they succeeded.

Save for the squadron of scarlet-and-azure striped fighters, who leapt to warp to pursue the enemy flagship.


	28. Honor, Heresy and Hope

_ This chapter is partially composed of cobbled together recollections of myself, Nex’arra, and Namna of Tildas II. I think the other two give me a bit too much credit in their version of events. _

Nex’arra had taken their traditional Sect, the fifty thousand civilians and the single legion of Esharioc soldiers who had been assigned to them for spiritual guidance. Looking back at the Imperator’s corpse, rotting on the throne, destroyed from within by the damage the human assassin and her poisoned blades had done it, Nex’arra felt a flicker of guilt at the treachery they were about to preform. The Imperator’s dying words had been ones of utmost trust in Nex’arra to preserve their people, and it was with this in mind that Nex’arra pushed their way through. Their Sanctity had simply misinterpreted the will of Zenitan. Must have. And in hopes of avoiding catastrophe, Zenitan had withheld aid and made alliances with the gods of these stars, hoping to find another way to stop the Abomination.

Nexarra boarded their ship, along with those assigned to follow them, and left the new homeworld, ordering a course charted to Haven. They’d explained to the others the necessity of what was about to happen.

***

“The Imperator is slain.” That had gone over badly, but the body was there for all to see, and their congregation was forced to accept that much as truth. “We have been misled about the course our god wishes for us. If we wish to right it, we must go to Haven. There are gods in this galaxy, not of the Abomination, that our own wishes to make Alliances with. Through the last words of the Imperator, I was granted a vision.” A lie, of course, but partially true. The truth had been revealed through the last words of the Imperator being echoed by that human assassin, the one they called the Mamba.

“Our own god makes peace with theirs. We, too, must make peace with them, to stand united against the Abomination. The Imperator’s dying words named me Their Sanctity’s heir.” Again, mostly true, or at the very least, it could be interpreted as such. “Guide our people.” Was certainly a form of endorsement.

“I have issued transmissions to as many others as I can, but their own High Speakers may disavow what I have said. In this, they become heretics. Our god has made his will known, and it goes in contrast to what we previously believed.”

They were about to commit the greatest heresy in living memory, and yet they branded the other speakers as heretics. The irony of that was not lost on them, but it was necessary all the same. Nex’arra boarded the ship, with civilians boarding it first. Then the Legion boarded, all twelve thousand troopers and the thousand Crusaders. Another race might have been concerned about treachery from professional soldiers so indoctrinated, but ironically that was what Nex’arra was counting on. Nex’arra was their Speaker for the God, who could be countermanded before these people only by the Imperator, and with the Imperator slain, until a successor was chosen, they were Nex’s and Nex’s alone to command in the name of their god, and would follow Nex’arra without question.

They boarded the ship and soared towards Haven.

***

They were intercepted by a Keldebriar fleet three quarters of the way there. The Keldebriar officer was hailed. “Do not fire, please! We offer unconditional surrender. We have been branded heretics by our people and we ask for shelter. We have a legion of soldiers who are willing to fight alongside the Hegemony!”

The Keldebrair officer patched the hail through to the Emperor himself upon the scan of the ship proving that it had no weaponry. The Emperor spoke to Nex’arra.

“I am Emperor Terion e’Klae, selected from among the Lords of the Keldebriar prides to lead our people. You are a leader of an invading, genocidal force. I would have your explanation, now, as to your intentions.”

***

Nex’arra took a breath. “My People…the majority of our people were destroyed by Kyriion, this you probably already knew. A very powerful religious leader who had previously been a decorated war hero managed to rally our people under the banner of one of our gods, the god of healing. Once They had done so, They declared themselves Imperator and led our people on what became known as the Crusade of Survival. The logic was that to survive, we had to annihilate anything that fed the Abomination, what the priests called Kyriion. I was given charge of the fifty thousand with me and the thirteen thousand warriors as my personal dominion. However, the doctrine of our new faith taught that the Imperator never errored, as the living voice of Zenitan, and we were to follow Their orders without question, as my own congregation does mine. The issue is that as the war continued, our people became aware, at least mine did, that several of the Imperator’s assumptions, views, et cetera, were being proven inaccurate. He proclaimed that the Abomination had clouded his sight but to believe that such a being could overpower Zenitan was revolting, and I realized, heretical. When the team who assassinated him named their worlds and their life as a form of divinity, we saw a new possibility, and thus have come to surrender.”

Terion thought about this, his mind putting the pieces together.

“Am I to take from this that this is a sectarian conflict, and that your sect may be friendly to us?”

Nex’arra paused, then replied, “In broad strokes, yes, this is correct enough. We are at your mercy, Emperor, and offer our unconditional surrender to you in the name of making peace, and learning of your gods.”

A few of the other ships were primarily crewed by humans, but it was the Keldebriar emperor, as one of the Heads of state, now in command. “HALT! They have yielded honorably. We are bound by the codes to take them into custody and attempt to make peace. To fail to do so would be in violation of all ideals and laws of honor, as well as common sense. There are non-combatants aboard a peaceful vessel there and I will have executed by ion purge any who fire upon it. It is what separates us from the likes of their former Imperator. Nex’arra, I believe you said your name was. You are now a prisoner of war, taken by the Keldebrair.”

***

As the colony ship was escorted to one of the Hegemonic worlds, armed Keldebrair troops boarding and locking down the weaponry for the time being at least, Nex’arra reflected on what the Esharioc had learned from the encounter. The Keldebriar held to strict honor, which they had known to a point already. Their people, the juveniles at least, were frightened, but Nex’arra calmed them with a few words.

“My people. I am sure what we are about to see is strange, and frightening. I do not condemn you for your fear, as we now tread as prisoners of aliens to us. However, they have taken us into custody with honor and sworn us no harm. They believe we may be allies to them eventually, in their own struggles against the Abomination. Trust me, my people, for this way, peace, lies our best hope of survival.”

Once they had disembarked their ship, they were brought to a camp to be searched for any biological or chemical weapons, then were given more satisfactory quarters, with at least one Nathian flinching from them. The Epomi farms were nearby, but between the Esharioc heretics’ new home and the farms were barracks of soldiers who would attack if any trouble started.

Then a Nathian entered to speak to Nex’arra. One bearing the sigil of the medics and aid workers of this civilization.

“My name is Aid Corps Chief Namna of the Tiledain clan. Your people have waged war against mine, and I’m given to understand that you represent a heretical sect of the death cult that has led you to war against us. A sect that wants peace, correct?”

Nex’arra nodded, then spoke. “Our people would not have said it was a death cult. Say instead, a war cult. One that believed only through war could we earn our lives.” Namna slashed a paw through the air.

“Stow that, you slaughtered thousands of civilians. But you’ve surrendered. Why?”

Nex’arra dropped on their backwards-jointed knees. “Because it became apparent that what we believed was wrong. That our Imperator was either mistaken as to the will of our god or a heretical liar. We have come to realize that our only hope is to be allies, to bond with your people. I spoke with the one known as Mamba before she died. I wish to learn your ways, and help you rebuild this galaxy.”

Namna paused. “I need an answer to a question. The admiral of this invasion. The one you call Tusaroth. Where is he going? He was driven from the Haven system after the last world-killer was destroyed, where would he have gone?”

“I’m…not sure. Perhaps Terra, or Tildas II. I’m given to understand that those worlds especially were marked for devastation by the Imperator.” Namna reeled. “My homeworld…my niece and nephew and many of my clan are on Tildas. Why…why would he want them destroyed? What have we done to your people?”

Nex’arra shuddered. “Proved that bonding between the Hegemonic races was what made you so strong. They believed that if a world where the Hegemony first started coming together could be destroyed, it would prove that your faith was the false one, and terrorize you into yielding. I think They were wrong. I hope they were.”

Namna walked out, shaking and contacted Jake and Callie. “The enemy is heading for Tildas. Find him and kill him, please. Don’t let our people die. Don’t let your kids…”

“Understood. That monster will never know what hit him.”

She contacted Tildas II, knowing full well that they had nowhere near enough ships to evacuate everyone on time.

***

Namna spoke with several juvenile Esharioc, and slowly came to realize the indoctrination that had been worked upon them. Shen was with her, and helped her go through it. They flinched from him, but slowly and surely, they began to wind down. He helped soothe Namna’s anxiety about Tildas, slowly building a friendship between the two of them. Dalafer had been sent elsewhere, to assist in aiding other refugees, stating that he’d seen far too much of the Esharioc already…but reports were coming in from the other camp that he was proving to be a lifesaver. Namna held to her beliefs about the war, that anything could be changed, that anything could come around but her fear grew as time passed, and Shen eventually took her paw and reminded her of her siblings, the ones who’d saved Tildas before.

***

Nex’arra was still reeling from what their people had done to the Hegemony when Endirmas Blorgi arrived. As they watched the young of the Hegemony species play - from a far distance, Nex’arra had no desire to frighten them - the Esharioc’s innards twisted with loathing for their own people and how eagerly they had once hated and damned these innocent beings.

Then Blorgi spoke, interrupting their thoughts. The Vulpexi was clearly nervous, and yet he knew he needed to take part in the conversation to come in service to the Hegemony. “My name is Endirmas Blorgi. I’m the current leader of the Vulpexi. Your people have invaded and committed atrocities beyond count. Mine did, once.”

“Why did yours stop?”

“Because the humans defeated us. Soundly. After the Keldebriar had driven us far away from their space when we’d foolishly tried to attack them. And now we are part of the Hegemony, heavily involved in building its economy. If your people truly wish to find a better way, the Hegemony will allow it. But don’t cross them. Give a true show of faith and good intentions, and they’ll help you rebuild into something better.”

Nex’arra thought about what the Esharioc had to offer the Hegemony. Skill in battle…but perhaps more significantly, they’d figured out forms of genetic engineering, ones that could be combined with Galri technology to create something truly wonderful.

But first to earn trust…

“Thank you, Endirmas. Please help the Nathian take care of my people. I must go gather my Legion. As I understand it, a battle is still underway, and I would like to leave no doubt that we are on the side of the Hegemony, now, we heretics of hope and peace.”

***

Namna watched as the black and chrome ship the Esharioc had arrived in took off, carrying Nex’arra and their legion. They saw Endirmas Blorgi, and greeted the Vulpexi. “What did you do?”

“I thought it might help to know that other beings who’d once been monsters could make a change. That perhaps, if the Esharioc proved their good intentions, they would find the way forward easier. They’re going to assist the forces at Haven.”

Namna glanced at him, askance, then thought about it. Who better to advise a heretic of a nihilistic war cult seeking peace and hope than a person who’d once been a charitable scholar interested in the rest of the galaxy, attempting to reform a society that had, at the time, been an elitist, self-serving plutocracy?

“I see. Thank you Endirmas.”

“Of course. I brought the material you asked for, to help here, and it will be the Consortium’s honor to donate the funding necessary to the Aid Corps for operations here.”

Namna hugged Endirmas, making his hide ripple with joy at the simple kindness. Shen approached, and to Endirmas’s great shock, embraced them both. No human had ever shown him physical affection so openly. “Thank you. Let me help however I can.”

***

Rudi Ceris and Galina were scanning the news when they saw the transmission that a large number of Esharioc had defected and were now inbound to assist the Hegemony, as a gesture of the desire to prove their good intentions. They carried the news to the leadership on the ground, who all but laughed it off, until he saw the signature. Chief Namna and Executor Endirmas Blorgi had both signed off on verification.

***

As the ship jumped to warp and prepared to engage the enemy – once their own people, who now would brand them heretics, traitors, and killers – Nex’arra reflected on the madness that had led them to this point. Hatred, cruelty, stupidity, fear, indoctrination, and most tellingly, despair that there was a better way. No more. No more. We will make it right, we heretics. “Soldiers of the Esharioc. Crusaders of Zenitan. We will be dropping into battle against those who were once our own people. Spare any who surrender. Spare no effort to defend the civilians of the Hegemony. They require our aid. We will prove that our people want peace. We will build a better galaxy as a united people, and we will repay their mercy with our aid. All units,” Nex’arra said, voice booming now as the Imperator’s once had. “Prepare to drop!”


	29. The Battle for Haven

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwfJsKfCnaM>  
  
The Hegemony soldiers were holding, slowly driving back the Esharioc army. The enemy ground forces had expended so much of their strength to take Bastion that they had left themselves critically undermanned for the rest of the campaign, and it was telling against them now. Still, their numbers being what they were, they did have more than enough to overwhelm the defenders of Haven, at least.

Then something happened, as Joan Bonhauer and her troops prepared to meet yet another rush by the enemy troopers. A black and chrome pod fell from above, landing in the midst of the enemy, and Joan began laughing. Such was the disregard of life among these beings that they didn’t care if reinforcing drop pods crushed their own troops.

Then the soldiers stepped out of those pods. And revealed the paint job they’d put on their armor. Hegemony colors. The Esharioc from within the pods began ferociously battling their own brethren as Joan watched, enthralled by the battle and the manic, hopeful laugh now welling up in her chest.

The allied Esharioc began rushing forward with shock blades and gravity hammers, and it was then that the Tyrsian devastators opened fire with their heaviest weaponry on the enemy unit about to flank the guard position. The battle was turning around, the squads of allied Esharioc having been just enough to throw the enemy forces into disarray.

Human soldiers began firing at the enemy formations, Keldebriar leaping and ambushing with gusto and practiced, lethal skill. The Tyrisians joined in, eager to come to close combat with an enemy who had slaughtered so many defenseless beings and show them what battle meant to an honorable race of warriors.

As the Esharioc were pushed back, the handful of enemy commanders still leading the armies on Haven began organizing a desperate counter-strike against what civilian centers they could find in a desperate attempt to force the Hegemonic defenders divide their focus, a maneuver that would allow them to scatter the Hegemony forces and defeat them in detail, or at the very least avenge the treachery of the sect that was now being led by the Imperator’s formerly favored priest. The infantry that approached the bunker were brought to a stunned halt when they saw the defenses around it. The Galri’s mastery of biological engineering, coupled with their growing determination and fear allowing some of their strictures to erode had led them to develop something that was definitively not a weapon. Merely a fortification that would prove hostile to anything that entered with hostile intent. The Epomi’s mastery of agriculture had allowed said masterwork of defensive biological engineering – and loophole abuse – to grow to truly massive proportions all around the civilian bunkers, creating a living guardian against which even the mightiest of the human companions, dogs, paled in comparison.

Constantly moving vines covered in venomous thorns wreathed the entrance to the bunker. A handful of Esharioc troopers attempted to push through it, assuming that their power armor would protect them, but were seized by the thorns, having their armor quickly wedged open before the thorns and venom tore into them, leaving them writhing in pain as the venom worked its way through their systems, and when they finally stopped writhing, they were dragged into the vines to feed the plants’ further growth. The Epomi had been quite disturbed by the concept, but when it was explained that the Galri could create such a creature that would be loyal to hegemony species, the Epomi had assisted in the growth, and now thousands of them and the Galri remained safely in the heavily fortified and hardened coral bunkers that the two races had built together.

The enemy began withdrawing away from the eerie vines, only to be attacked by Keldebriar troopers who’d hidden away in the trees and now began blazing and hacking away at the approaching Esharioc and made them regret the attempt to attack unarmed civilians. Even more masterful at breaking the Esharioc’s morale were the Tenebrae who slithered out from the brush, tentacles wrapping around the Esharioc troopers and dragging them into the plants, quickly silencing them with knife slashes even as they desperately attempted to escape.

The armored vehicle component sent to engage the other bunkers fared no better. Turrets, heavily machined by the Palnt and built in Dembra forges brutalized the armored vehicles while heavy mines blew them apart from underneath, the bunkers’ heavy construction withstanding what fire the vehicles could deliver, until the Tyrisian heavy weapons troopers added their own weight of fire against the hated invaders and began ripping further through the tanks. The enemy crew attempted to flee the tanks but were rapidly surrounded and fired upon by human soldiers. Many surrendered in the face of the ferocity they were now facing, and with the knowledge that a sect of their own people had turned against them, they saw a potential for survival in future cooperation, while others fought to the death and were quickly cut down.

Out in the more open areas, armored vehicles driven by Vulpexi were rampaging through the heart of the enemy base, and that, coupled with a frenzied rush by the combined forces of the Tyrisians, humans, Keldebrair, Tenebrae, and the rapid strikes from the Ivari’s orbital attack vehicles that continually swooped down to strike at vulnerable points in the Esharioc formation, plus the artillery still raining down and the onslaught of a legion led by the Imperator’s former right hand rapidly panicked tens of thousands of Esharioc troopers, who threw down their arms and surrendered. Many others turned their guns on their still-loyal comrades and began fighting alongside the Hegemony troopers and the heretics, while still others chose death by their own hand. Given all these things stacking up at once and the invading force was for the first time able to use the term “besieged” to describe their own position.

The medics darted around under curtains of fire set up by their allies, rapidly tending to the wounded, Hegemony and Imperium alike, saving as many lives as they could, led by the likes of Namna, Shen and even Dalafer. The fighting was ferocious, and Nex’arra found herself fighting alongside a human one moment, other heretics the next, Keldebriar, Tyrisians, everyone. Joan Bonhauer reflected on how mad her life had become that enemies from every phase of humanity’s rise through the galaxy, including former foes of this very war, were now fighting side by side to reject the bloodshed, to demand better for the beleaguered galaxy.

Voices hoarse from screaming their defiance, limbs leaden from weariness, the Hegemony forces continued fighting, bravely, side-by-side, the strength granted by hope for victory, rage and sorrow at their losses and desire to remain alongside their comrades, the Hegemonic Guard threw themselves into battle with ever-increasing frenzy, firing and rushing, driving the Esharioc back kilometers at a time when the fronts had been moving forward by meters a week in either direction for the majority of the five Terran years the war had lasted.

At long last, the Esharioc forces rallied, desperately counter-attacking and for a moment bending the Hegemony’s lines almost in half, pressing everything they had for the bowed center, calling in what few atmospheric craft they had left to strike at the enemy center before the Vulpexi armored vehicles, Tyrisian warriors, and Spectrum Guard, the elite troops who guarded Haven, pushed forward in a brutal counter-attack, thousands dying on both sides as the extended flanks of the Hegemony forces pushed inward and collapsed the entire enemy wedge, slaughtering Esharioc in droves until they could re-form their ranks.

The enemy began falling back to their ships, but those were quickly destroyed by Ivari pilots and the Hegemony’s artillery. It was only then that the sixty thousand Esharioc warriors remaining in opposition out of the millions who’d originally landed on Haven finally understood how thoroughly they had erred in attacking these strange races, these strange, ferocious people who had managed to tie dozens of peoples together, and it was there that the Esharioc, the fanatical maniacs who’d caused so much devastation in the name of their gods, shot their commanders and threw their weapons down, surrendering at last.

Nex’arra smiled. Now that they had yielded, the Esharioc people could be rebuilt, could return taken worlds to the peoples, make all necessary reparations, and have some hope of rebuilding, reunifying in a new, peaceful Imperium.

And it was thanks to the mad beings that now stood beside them, screaming joy and defiance at yet another victory, yet another war brought to a close, yet another enemy defeated and brought to understand the way things were done in this galaxy. As the Hegemony’s people cheered all around Nex’arra, it was all the priest could do to laugh and crack their exoskeleton as they witnessed the destruction of their people’s former leadership, and the opportunity to replace it with something better, find a new way forward, rebuild their people after so much horror they had suffered, reform them after all the horror they had inflicted in the name of their god, the god whose will they had so grotesquely misunderstood.

Nex’arra and the other heretics raised their voices in joy alongside the victorious Hegemony troops, having come to the realization that their heresy had been right, that they had found the correct course, that the Esharioc could have hope again, hope not drenched in blood.

Victory at last.


	30. Last Ride of the Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story comes full circle above Tildas II, set to the piece that is the anthem of the series

[Last Ride of the Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyXBXl3DaGg)

The message they’d gotten from Namna burned in their minds as Tiger Squadron continued to pursue the fleeing Esharioc Admiral. They knew by the nature of hyperspace that they would arrive at the same time he did, or mere seconds later, and that would give them all the time they needed to prevent him from destroying the Nathian world on which the founders had been raised.

Jake and Callie’s palms sweated as they gripped the controls of their Raksashas, willing them to go faster, desperate to arrive and destroy the flagship of the monster threatening their family, and their children.

***

The Nathian who had taken command of skywatch had heard about the invasion, the coming attack, and was struggling to load as many people aboard the transport ships as he could, but the heartless reality was that there simply weren’t enough resources to evacuate even close to everyone who should be evacuated. And the enemy flagship would be here any moment. When the sensors screamed that the monster flagship had in fact, arrived, he ordered everyone not scheduled for evacuation into the bunkers, knowing full well that absent a miraculous arrival by a huge evacuation fleet in the immediate future, the bunkers would run out of oxygen in the aftermath of the bombing that would follow well before the atmosphere recovered.

Then his comms blazed to life with music again, and a familiar set of voices cried out into the comms. “This is Tiger Squadron. Don’t give up, guys, we’re back once again.”

The cheers that went up throughout the colony at that broadcast were deafening.

***

Jake and Callie bantered as they finally dropped out of warp. “Takes me back,” Jake said, as he dipped his Raksasha’s wing to evade an approaching missile, firing off a few of his own torpedoes in response. “Above Tildas II, taking on an impossibly massive ship, horribly underarmed…and yet knowing we’re not backing down.”

Callie chuckled. “First dogfight and our last…just feels right, doesn’t it?” She took a breath, “TIGER SQUADRON,” she howled into the comms, with a feeling of finality settling in her chest. “FANGS OUT!”

The squadron plunged headlong through the hollow void of space between them and their target, evading the missiles, projectiles and beams as they came, flickering into such a wide formation that there was no chance of colliding with one another, and no chance of the enemy being able to track all of them at once. Tusaroth may have been a brilliant fleet commander but in regards to commanding a fleet of a single flagship-grade dreadnaught against a squadron of elite starfighters, he was clearly operating out of his expertise. The tracking guns of the Esharioc ship blazed into the fighters that had willingly abandoned their own shields to get inside of the flagships, their guns flickering to life as his weapon systems were riddled with holes or blown apart with plasma, wave surges, and kinetic projectiles, while the Tigers continually evaded his own attacks. Dozens of them had been shot down, their ships flying apart, their bodies ejected into the cold void of space that they had all been dancing with as long as they’d been in the navy.

Jake and Callie made a mad dart towards the weapons bay and intercepted the first of the massive novabombs as it was fired, detonating it in the abyss of space, far away from Tildas, and then wheeled around and launched their own torpedoes at the ship, hoping to sympathetically detonate the rest of the bombs.

Ywyn was demonstrating her nerve, the nightmare of guns flashing around her somehow exhilarating her rather than terrifying her as it once had. She dropped a few torpedoes on the point defense currently harrying one of the fighter wings. Then she took a moment to strafe the enemy spacers she saw through one of the portholes with her kinetics before dipping one wing and evading another barrage, which was quickly replied to by a torpedo from someone else breaking apart that battery.

Callie was still darting around other guns, firing at the Esharioc’s weapon systems and hoping to break them apart to reduce the losses so that the entire squadron could more easily close for the kill. Dozens more tigers had died in the assault, but one of them had managed to strike a shield generator, and a mere moment ago Jake had finally angled himself to be able to shoot out and prematurely detonate yet another of the nova bombs, this one considerably closer to the Esharioc ship, actually melting off part of the bow as atmosphere leaked from the ship. The guns of the flagship downed more of the Tigers as Tusaroth grew impatient, desperate to rid himself of the harrying swarm of fighters that would make even his death in vain.

Jake and Callie offered him no rest, however, continually dancing with the guns, far better than those of the Vulpexi dreadnaught that they had destroyed thirty-eight Terran years prior, but their own skill had grown to match it, even as the fire flared around them, they could hardly deny that it was as beautiful and terrifying to be surrounded by anti-ship fire as it had ever been, even as you danced along the ragged edge of death in the endless abyss of space, and yet it was never anything but absolutely exhilarating.

The two master pilots evaded yet another barrage and shattered the guns that were firing it, even as the rest of the squadron destroyed the last of the nova bombs, kicking of a chain reaction that rattled and brutalized the massive Esharioc flagship, they continued pressing the attack. The enemy had been clever in their ship construction, now detaching the useless and rapidly self-destructing bomb bay and attempting to bring its heavy weapons to bear as fire blazed through the interior. Jake and Callie were having none of it, streaking up as Ywyn and Amelia destroyed the last couple shield generators and firing their heaviest warheads in a stream, straight into the bridge where the Esharioc commander would be, then sweeping down to strike directly at the now-exposed reactor, determined to destroy the dreadnaught completely. The reactor began melting down, the devastation having finally caught, up, and Jake and Callie attempted to blaze out of range of the ensuing blast, as they had dozens of times throughout their storied careers.

The Esharioc’s last grand ship, the monstrous black and chrome construction of blades and wrath, came apart from within, consumed by the silver-white fire of antimatter explosions and actinic nuclear reactions as Tiger Squadron withdrew to their carrier, the Khan. Amelia was calling roll with her pilots as she realized that both Jake and Callie were missing.

***

They re-entered the Khan and added a new set of names to the Wall, though as no one had seen Jake or Callie be shot down, they held off on adding those. The founders, the Andalas, had survived so many times before, it would be absurd to count the out now.

***

Jake and Callie Andala, master pilots, had failed to clear the reactor detonation. They’d managed to key their shields at the exact right moment to be flung away, viciously, from the dying titan of an Esharioc ship, escaping Tusaroth’s funeral pyre and plummeting, once more, to the green and blue world of Tildas II, streaking through the sky with contrails of fire until the moment their ships came crashing down on the soft red earth, skipping as bits of the ship broke off, the advanced inertial systems preserving their lives despite the devastating G-forces that wracked their craft. As they slowly climbed out of the ruined fighters, the two of them laughed yet again, staggering into each others’ arms and laughing madly the whole while.

“Back to where we started.”

“Heh, figures, our first battle and our last end the same way. Shot down over a peaceful world where we can find our family. Fucking hell, what a way to end a career.” The comms from the ruined fighters hissed as Amelia attempted to hail them, and the two pilots managed, despite cracked bones and pain from the brutal landing, to limp over to the comms and reply. “Jake and Callie Andala, accounted for and alive. Shot down, our craft look to be essentially beyond repair entirely. It’s alright though. Seriously. We won our last battle, our kids are safe, our people are safe…our part in this is over, isn’t it?”

***

Back on the Khan, as Amelia finished soldering the names of the fallen into the Wall, she reflected on the reports she’d gotten as the Squadron had pursued Tusaroth. Apparently, the enemy had been repelled with the help of Esharioc defectors at Haven, and the war was being finished through negotiation by the leader of said defectors rallying the rest of the Esharioc to the new, peaceful sect, with the help of the Hegemony. Ywyn was helping her, still excited to be part of the Squadron, and Amelia reflected that she was still excited to be leading it. But it was time to accept that things were changing. So as Jake and Callie asked that question, her childhood heroes finally brought to the exhaustion of a lifetime of war, she was able to answer and give them the rest they deserved. “Yeah, it’s over. Go home to your families. I think your war is at an end.”

***

The Andalas found their children, and managed to catch the kids as they dove into their parents’ arms, somehow finding the strength to do so despite barely holding their feet after the crash. The Nathian healers worked them over, and within a few hours, they were able to at least walk, and hold their kids again.

Within a few weeks, the Andala family found the bushes where Jake and Callie had crash landed after the Horizons went down, decades before, and ate the berries that had so alarmed their Nathian kin. As they walked, Jake realized that he was moving stiffly, even though the regeneration drugs should have fully healed him by now. Callie’s movement wasn’t any lighter, and the two started chuckling. It seemed that after years of flying, fighting, and living, age was finally starting to catch up.

As the little family ate the berries, the first food humans had eaten on an alien world, the Andala parents finally felt relaxed, at peace, and excited for civilian life. Alicia was giggling still as she and her brother ate, their parents having kept their promise to come home.

Looking up at the stars that night, Jake and Callie decided they’d seen them as close and as far as they wanted. Maybe some day, they’d show their kids more of the galaxy, but for now, they were going to stay on the ground and live out their days in peace.


	31. Coda: To the Galaxy With Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A fitting Epilogue

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5i7htF2AwY ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5i7htF2AwY)

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sAtqBrHA2I ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sAtqBrHA2I) (if you want an instrumental only)

Tony and Alicia stepped off the shuttle, looking around the planet their little team had been sent to. The local life forms had recently made contact, and wanted to talk. The Welcoming Exploratory Corps had been sent to make physical contact, and the two Andala siblings had eagerly signed up. They had gotten used to a lot of the older members of the Hegemonic Guard, Fleet or Exploratory Corps telling them that they were very similar to their parents at their age.

Yet they couldn’t deny the thrill that was setting foot on a new world, making contact with a strange new life form and starting the process of pack bonding it to member species of the Hegemony. Auntie Namna was really getting grey in the fur now, even though she’d been living with Shen for a while, the two of them were too old to keep doing this

. “Glad Jessie finally built those better breathpacks,” Tony quipped, as he looked around. “The old ones were way too heavy to carry over long distances. Remember that time on Caltalan?”

Alicia chuckled. “Yeah. Let’s see what these guys look…” The creature who appeared was strange. Massive, it had to be said. It looked a bit like the photographs of Kilicks she’d seen in text books, but this being clearly wasn’t one of them. Larger, for starters, and it had a different texture to it, one that argued for a fungoid rather than insectoid ancestry. It extended a strange, lumpy limb, its mouthparts moving and her translator chip picking up the words and rendering them in Galick.

“Are you the Hegemony representatives?” Alicia thought back to the day she had enlisted for this, after those long six standard months her parents had spent flying the little family around the galaxy, deciding that their children deserved to see the stars as they had. Now in her early forties, she smiled as she remembered her parents’ beaming expressions as she had been sworn in to the exploratory corps of the United Hegemony of Free Worlds. It was in that spirit that she extended her hand grasped the other creature’s limb, and smiled at it. “Yeah. My name is Alicia Andala. My brother is Tony Andala, and our companions include representatives of almost every species in the Hegemony to date.” And they did. Ambrin, Ghenkl, Tyrisian, Tenebrac, Keldebrair, Dembra, Palnt, Epomi, Ivari, Nathian, Vulpexi and now one of the Esharelia.

It had come to light that “Esharioc” hadn’t been the original name of that species, and had rather meant “Survivor through will.” In the aftermath of peace being made and Nex’arra taking over them, rebuilding their faith, they had taken a new name, one that now meant “Survivor through bonding.” And it was for that reason that the Esharelia, one of the very few species that matched humans for sheer adaptability, were among the highest percentages of Exploratory Corps personnel.

The strange being before her introduced itself as well. “I am one of the bodies of Jak’cos’emra. Our species has few individuals. Hive entity, we believe it is called in your people’s lexicon. We know that your people have had unpleasant experiences with similar beings in the past, at least that is our understanding from other communication, but we see no cause for conflict. We simply wish to spread and grow and see what new roots may be grown out among the stars.”

Alicia smiled, thinking about her own words to her parents when she’d talked to them about enlisting. She thought about the things they’d seen, the things she’d read about, the strange hyperspace distortion that had had everyone all rattled for a while, all the wonderful and terrifying things she’d seen while flying through space, all the incredible people she’d come to know and love.

“Glad to hear it. Let me be the first to welcome you to the Hegemony. Can’t speak for everyone, but I think you’re going to love it up there.” 

*** 

After the conclusion of the little landing party’s conversations with the large, frightening looking beings who’d actually turned out to be quite friendly and physically, in person welcoming them to the Hegemony, Alicia and Tony reboarded the ship that formed their part of the exploration fleet. It was a re-purposed naval craft that had at one point been a carrier. Their parents’ carrier, in fact. The Khan. Tiger Squadron’s membership had slowly aged out, retired, moved on, and given the lack of any further crises, the special units had widely been left to disband, the Guard and Fleet being more than adequate for what few occasional conflicts arose. 

The Khan had been almost entirely re-modeled for exploration and long-term stays, but one thing had remained. The Wall where the fallen pilots’ names were carved still stayed there, now with an additional few sentences: Herein are the names of those who served on this ship in Tiger Squadron, before it was disbanded. From a duo who were humanity’s first colonists to all those who fought in said squadron for the rights of all sapient life and made the galaxy the haven of exploration and wonder it is today, this wall stands in memorial. 

She glanced at the last two names on the Wall, etched in after their retirement, in their honor.  _ Jake and Callie Anala, ages 88, at time of death _ . She and Tony swapped glances and smiled sadly. Their parents had seen them off, and it was now that their children enjoyed the galaxy they’d labored to build. They’d gotten to die in bed, holding each other, and knowing that their children had the same love of exploring space that they’d had. They’d be proud to see how far their children had come now.

Alicia and Tony thought about all the things they’d seen, all the species they’d helped make contact with, all the wonders they’d explored.

Yeah, Mom and Dad would be proud.

****

_ It has been my honor to compile this research of the events surrounding humanity’s first entrance into the galaxy. When my original work was first submitted, many educators liked it, in fact, many of the books I wrote are still used now when talking about the most recent era of galactic history. However, after over twelve standard years of research and interviews, I came to the conclusion that there was quite a bit still lacking from Titans of Terra, however historical it may have been. It was then that it was suggested to me that I didn’t need to rid myself of all the research I had done that hadn’t made it into the final cut, and it was with that in mind that I began working on the account you have just read, that of Tiger Squadron. I attempted several titles for this piece of writing as it was, first and foremost, a study of the heroes that so defined humanity during that phase of their history, however it wasn’t until I really thought about it that it became clear that the focus of the story should be on the lives of the two people who had been there at both the first launch of human colony vessels to the end of the Esharioc War. It has been my honor to record the events of that time and the lives of those who took part. It is my great hope that the friends, family, and admirers of these heroes have found my account to be informative, enjoyable, and inspirational. _ – Endirmas Blorgi, Scholar of Human Studies and history at Haven University.


End file.
